I Mentioned In One Of My First Letters That East Maui, That Part Of The Island Which Lies East Of The Isthmus Of Perpetual Dust-Storms, Consists Of A Mountain Dome 10,000 Feet In Height, With A Monstrous Base.

Its slopes are very regular, varying from eight to ten degrees.

Its lava-beds differ from those of Kauai and Oahu in being lighter in colour, less cellular, and more impervious to water. The windward side of the mountain is gashed and slashed by streams, which in their violence have excavated large pot-holes, which serve as reservoirs, and it is covered to a height of over 2000 feet by a luxuriant growth of timber. On the leeward side, several black and very fresh-looking streams of lava run into the sea, and the whole coast for some height above the shore shows most vigorous volcanic action. Elsewhere the rock is red and broken, and lateral cones abound near the base.

The ascent from Makawao, though it is over rather a desolate tract of land, has in its lower stages such a dismal growth of pining koa and spurious sandal-wood, and in its upper ones so much ohelo scrub, with grass and common aspleniums quite up to the top, that as one sits lazily on one's sure-footed horse, the fact that one is ascending a huge volcano is not forced upon one by any overmastering sterility and nakedness. Somehow, one expects to pass through some ulterior stage of blackness up to the summit. It is no such thing; and the great surprise of Haleakala to me was, that when according to calculation there should have been a summit, an abyss of vast dimensions opened below. The mountain top has been in fact blown off, and one is totally powerless to imagine what the forces must have been which rent it asunder.

The crater was clear of fog and clouds, and lighted in every part by the risen sun. The whole, with its contents, can be seen at a single glance, though its girdling precipices are nineteen miles in extent. Its huge, irregular floor is 2000 feet below; New York might be hidden away within it, with abundant room to spare; and more than one of the numerous subsidiary cones which uplift themselves solitary or in clusters through the area, attain the height of Arthur's Seat at Edinburgh. On the north and east are the Koolau and Kaupo Gaps, as deep as the crater, through which oceans of lava found their way to the sea. It looks as if the volcanic forces, content with rending the mountain top in twain, had then passed into an endless repose.

The crater appears to be composed of a hard grey clinkstone, much fissured; but lower down the mountain, the rock is softer, and has a bluish tinge. The internal cones are of very regular shape, and most of them look as if their fires had only just gone out, with their sides fiercely red, and their central cavities lined with layers of black ash. They are all composed of cinders of light specific gravity, and much of the ash is tinged with the hydrated oxide of iron. Very few of the usual volcanic products are present. {335} Small quantities of sulphur, in a very impure form, exist here and there, but there are no sulphur or steam-cracks, or hot springs on any part of the mountain. With its cold ashes and dead force, it is a most tremendous spectacle of the power of fire.

Some previous travellers had generously left some faggots on the summit, and we made a large fire for warmth, and I rolled my blanket round me, and sat with my feet among the hot embers, but all to no purpose. The wind was strong and keen, and the fierce splendour of the tropic sun conveyed no heat. Mr. A. went away investigating, the native rolled himself in his poncho and fell asleep by the fire, and I divided the time between glimpses into the awful desolation of the crater, snatched between the icy gusts of wind, and the enjoyment of the wonderful cloud scenery which to everybody is a great charm of the view from Haleakala. The day was perfect; for first we had an inimitable view of the crater and all that could be seen from the mountain-top, and then an equally inimitable view of Cloudland. There was the gaunt, hideous, desolate abyss, with its fiery cones, its rivers and surges of black lava and grey ash, crossing and mingling all over the area, mixed with splotches of colour and coils of satin rock, its walls dark and frowning, everywhere riven and splintered, and clouds perpetually drifting in through the great gaps, and filling up the whole crater with white swirling masses, which in a few minutes melted away in the sunshine, leaving it all as sharply definite as before. Before noon clouds surrounded the whole mountain, not in the vague flocculent, meaningless masses one usually sees, but in Arctic oceans, where lofty icebergs, floes and pack, lay piled on each other, glistening with the frost of a Polar winter; then alps on alps, and peaks of well remembered ranges gleaming above glaciers, and the semblance of forests in deep ravines loaded with new fallen snow. Snow-drifts, avalanches, oceans held in bondage of eternal ice, and all this massed together, shifting, breaking, glistering, filling up the broad channel which divides Maui from Hawaii, and far away above the lonely masses, rose, in turquoise blue, like distant islands, the lofty Hawaiian domes of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, with snow on Mauna Kea yet more dazzling than the clouds. There never was a stranger contrast than between the hideous desolation of the crater below, and those blue and jewelled summits rising above the shifting clouds.

After some time the scene shifted, and through glacial rifts appeared as in a dream the Eeka mountains which enfold the Iao valley, broad fields of cane 8000 feet below, the flushed palm- fringed coast, and the deep blue sea sleeping in perpetual calm. But according to the well-known fraud which isolated altitudes perpetrate upon the eye, it appeared as if we were looking up at our landscape, not down; and no effort of the eye or imagination would put things at their proper levels.

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