A Lonely White Man Who Lives Among The Lava, And Believes He Has Discovered The Secret Of Perpetual Motion:

And the lava-flow from Mauna Loa, which reached the sea 40 miles from its exit from the mountain.

I was riding through the brushwood with a native, and not able to see two yards in any direction, when emerging from the thick scrub, we came upon the torrent of 1859 within six feet of us, a huge, straggling, coal-black river, broken up into streams in our vicinity, but on the whole, presenting an iridescent uphill expanse a mile wide. We had reached one of the divergent streams to which it had been said after its downward course of 9000 feet, "Hitherto shalt thou come and no further," while the main body had pursued its course to the ocean. Whatever force impelled it had ceased to act, and the last towering wave of fire had halted just there, and lies a black arrested surge 10 feet high, with tender ferns at its feet, and a scarcely singed ohia bending over it. The flow, so far as we scrambled up it, is heaped in great surges of a fierce black, fiercely reflecting the torrid sun, cracked, and stained yellow and white, and its broad glistening surface forms an awful pathway to the dome-like crest of Mauna Loa, now throbbing with internal fires, and crowned with a white smoke wreath, that betokens the action of the same forces which produced this gigantic inundation. Close to us the main river had parted above and united below a small mamane tree with bracken under its shadow, and there are several oases of the same kind.

I have twice been down to the larger world of the wool-shed, when tired of strips of dried mutton and my own society. The hospitality there is as great as the accommodation is small. The first time, I slept on the floor of the shed with some native women who were up there, and was kept awake all night by the magnificence of the light on the volcano. The second time, several of us slept in a small, dark grass-wigwam, only intended as a temporary shelter, the lowliest dwelling in every sense of the word that I ever occupied. That evening was the finest I have seen on the islands; there was a less abrupt transition from day to night, and the three great mountains and the desert were etherealised and glorified by a lingering rose and violet light. When darkness came on, our great camp fire was hardly redder than the glare from the volcano, and its leaping flames illuminated as motley a group as you would wish to see; the native shearers, who, after shearing eighty sheep each in a day, washed, and changed their clothes before eating; a negro goatherd with a native wife and swarthy children, two native women, my host and myself, all engaged in the rough cooking befitting the region, toasting strips of jerked mutton on sticks, broiling wild bullock on the coals, baking kalo under ground, and rolls in a rough stone oven, and all speaking that base mixture of English and Hawaiian which is current coin here.

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