It Had
Vanished Into The Distance Beyond Their Ken.
Others saw it rolling
farther on - I know I did; and it is my firm conviction that that
stone is still rolling.
Our last day in the crater, Ukiukiu gave us a taste of his strength.
He smashed Naulu back all along the line, filled the House of the
Sun to overflowing with clouds, and drowned us out. Our rain-gauge
was a pint cup under a tiny hole in the tent. That last night of
storm and rain filled the cup, and there was no way of measuring the
water that spilled over into the blankets. With the rain-gauge out
of business there was no longer any reason for remaining; so we
broke camp in the wet-gray of dawn, and plunged eastward across the
lava to the Kaupo Gap. East Maui is nothing more or less than the
vast lava stream that flowed long ago through the Kaupo Gap; and
down this stream we picked our way from an altitude of six thousand
five hundred feet to the sea. This was a day's work in itself for
the horses; but never were there such horses. Safe in the bad
places, never rushing, never losing their heads, as soon as they
found a trail wide and smooth enough to run on, they ran. There was
no stopping them until the trail became bad again, and then they
stopped of themselves. Continuously, for days, they had performed
the hardest kind of work, and fed most of the time on grass foraged
by themselves at night while we slept, and yet that day they covered
twenty-eight leg-breaking miles and galloped into Hana like a bunch
of colts. Also, there were several of them, reared in the dry
region on the leeward side of Haleakala, that had never worn shoes
in all their lives. Day after day, and all day long, unshod, they
had travelled over the sharp lava, with the extra weight of a man on
their backs, and their hoofs were in better condition than those of
the shod horses.
The scenery between Vieiras's (where the Kaupo Gap empties into the
sea) and Lana, which we covered in half a day, is well worth a week
or month; but, wildly beautiful as it is, it becomes pale and small
in comparison with the wonderland that lies beyond the rubber
plantations between Hana and the Honomanu Gulch. Two days were
required to cover this marvellous stretch, which lies on the
windward side of Haleakala. The people who dwell there call it the
"ditch country," an unprepossessing name, but it has no other.
Nobody else ever comes there. Nobody else knows anything about it.
With the exception of a handful of men, whom business has brought
there, nobody has heard of the ditch country of Maui. Now a ditch
is a ditch, assumably muddy, and usually traversing uninteresting
and monotonous landscapes. But the Nahiku Ditch is not an ordinary
ditch. The windward side of Haleakala is serried by a thousand
precipitous gorges, down which rush as many torrents, each torrent
of which achieves a score of cascades and waterfalls before it
reaches the sea. More rain comes down here than in any other region
in the world. In 1904 the year's downpour was four hundred and
twenty inches. Water means sugar, and sugar is the backbone of the
territory of Hawaii, wherefore the Nahiku Ditch, which is not a
ditch, but a chain of tunnels. The water travels underground,
appearing only at intervals to leap a gorge, travelling high in the
air on a giddy flume and plunging into and through the opposing
mountain. This magnificent waterway is called a "ditch," and with
equal appropriateness can Cleopatra's barge be called a box-car.
There are no carriage roads through the ditch country, and before
the ditch was built, or bored, rather, there was no horse-trail.
Hundreds of inches of rain annually, on fertile soil, under a tropic
sun, means a steaming jungle of vegetation. A man, on foot, cutting
his way through, might advance a mile a day, but at the end of a
week he would be a wreck, and he would have to crawl hastily back if
he wanted to get out before the vegetation overran the passage way
he had cut. O'Shaughnessy was the daring engineer who conquered the
jungle and the gorges, ran the ditch and made the horse-trail. He
built enduringly, in concrete and masonry, and made one of the most
remarkable water-farms in the world. Every little runlet and
dribble is harvested and conveyed by subterranean channels to the
main ditch. But so heavily does it rain at times that countless
spillways let the surplus escape to the sea.
The horse-trail is not very wide. Like the engineer who built it,
it dares anything. Where the ditch plunges through the mountain, it
climbs over; and where the ditch leaps a gorge on a flume, the
horse-trail takes advantage of the ditch and crosses on top of the
flume. That careless trail thinks nothing of travelling up or down
the faces of precipices. It gouges its narrow way out of the wall,
dodging around waterfalls or passing under them where they thunder
down in white fury; while straight overhead the wall rises hundreds
of feet, and straight beneath it sinks a thousand. And those
marvellous mountain horses are as unconcerned as the trail. They
fox-trot along it as a matter of course, though the footing is
slippery with rain, and they will gallop with their hind feet
slipping over the edge if you let them. I advise only those with
steady nerves and cool heads to tackle the Nahiku Ditch trail. One
of our cow-boys was noted as the strongest and bravest on the big
ranch. He had ridden mountain horses all his life on the rugged
western slopes of Haleakala. He was first in the horse-breaking;
and when the others hung back, as a matter of course, he would go in
to meet a wild bull in the cattle-pen.
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