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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Sometimes there was long,
ugly grass, a brownish green, coarse and tufty, for a mile or more.
Sometimes clumps of wintry-looking, dead trees, sometimes clumps of
attenuated living ones; but nothing to please the eye.
We saw
neither man nor beast the whole way, except a wild bull, which,
tearing down the mountain side, crossed the trail just in front of
us, causing a stampede among the mules, and it was fully an hour
before they were all caught again.
The only other incident was an earthquake, the most severe, the men
here tell me, that has been experienced for two years. One is
prepared for any caprices on the part of the earth here, yet when
there was a fearful internal throbbing and rumbling, and the trees
and grass swayed rapidly, and great rocks and masses of soil were
dislodged, and bounded down the hillside, and the earth reeled, and
my poor horse staggered and stopped short; far from rising to the
magnitude of the occasion, I thought I was attacked with vertigo,
and grasped the horn of my saddle to save myself from falling.
After a moment of profound stillness, there was again a subterranean
sound like a train in a tunnel, and the earth reeled again with such
violence that I felt as if the horse and myself had gone over. Poor
K. was nervous for some time afterwards. The motion was as violent
as that of a large ship in a mid-Atlantic storm.
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