The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
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The
Brown Tattooed Limbs Of One Man Are Stretched Across The Mat, The
Others Are Sitting Cross-Legged, Making Lauhala Leis.
One man is
making fishing-lines of a beautifully white and marvellously
tenacious fibre, obtained from an Hawaiian "flax" plant (possibly
Urtica argentea), very different from the New Zealand Phormium
tenax.
Nearly all the people of the valley are outside, having come
to see the wahine haole: only one white woman, and she a resident
of Hawaii, having been seen in Waimanu before. I am really alone,
miles of mountain and gulch lie between me and the nearest whites.
This is a wonderful place: a ravine about three miles long and
three-quarters of a mile wide, without an obvious means of ingress,
being walled in by precipices from 2000 to 4000 feet high. Five
cascades dive from the palis at its head, and unite to form a placid
river about up to a horse's body here, and deep enough for a horse
to swim in a little below. Dense forests of various shades of green
fill up the greater part of the valley, concealing the basins into
which the cascades leap, and the grey basalt of the palis is mostly
hidden by greenery. At the open end, two bald bluffs, one of them
2000 feet in height, confront the Pacific, and its loud booming surf
comes up to within one hundred yards of the house where I am
writing, but is banked off by a heaped-up barrier of colossal
shingle.
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