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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Our Hilo friends looked out the last
thing; saw the glare, and probably wondered how we were "getting
on," high up among the stars.
Mine were the only mortal eyes which
saw what is perhaps the grandest spectacle on earth. Once or twice
I felt so overwhelmed by the very sublimity of the loneliness, that
I turned to the six animals, which stood shivering in the north
wind, without any consciousness than that of cold, hunger, and
thirst. It was some relief even to pity them, for pity was at least
a human feeling, and a momentary rest from the thrill of the new
sensations inspired by the circumstances. The moon herself looked a
wan unfamiliar thing - not the same moon which floods the palm and
mango groves of Hilo with light and tenderness. And those palm and
mango groves, and lighted homes, and seas, and ships, and cities,
and faces of friends, and all familiar things, and the day before,
and the years before, were as things in dreams, coming up out of a
vanished past. And would there ever be another day, and would the
earth ever be young and green again, and would men buy and sell and
strive for gold, and should I ever with a human voice tell living
human beings of the things of this midnight? How far it was from
all the world, uplifted above love, hate, and storms of passion, and
war, and wreck of thrones, and dissonant clash of human thought,
serene in the eternal solitudes!
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