There are hosts of people who journey like restless spirits round
and about this earth in search of seascapes and landscapes and the
wonders and beauties of nature.
They overrun Europe in armies; they
can be met in droves and herds in Florida and the West Indies, at
the Pyramids, and on the slopes and summits of the Canadian and
American Rockies; but in the House of the Sun they are as rare as
live and wriggling dinosaurs. Haleakala is the Hawaiian name for
"the House of the Sun." It is a noble dwelling, situated on the
Island of Maui; but so few tourists have ever peeped into it, much
less entered it, that their number may be practically reckoned as
zero. Yet I venture to state that for natural beauty and wonder the
nature-lover may see dissimilar things as great as Haleakala, but no
greater, while he will never see elsewhere anything more beautiful
or wonderful. Honolulu is six days' steaming from San Francisco;
Maui is a night's run on the steamer from Honolulu; and six hours
more if he is in a hurry, can bring the traveller to Kolikoli, which
is ten thousand and thirty-two feet above the sea and which stands
hard by the entrance portal to the House of the Sun. Yet the
tourist comes not, and Haleakala sleeps on in lonely and unseen
grandeur.
Not being tourists, we of the Snark went to Haleakala. On the
slopes of that monster mountain there is a cattle ranch of some
fifty thousand acres, where we spent the night at an altitude of two
thousand feet. The next morning it was boots and saddles, and with
cow-boys and pack-horses we climbed to Ukulele, a mountain ranch-
house, the altitude of which, fifty-five hundred feet, gives a
severely temperate climate, compelling blankets at night and a
roaring fireplace in the living-room. Ukulele, by the way, is the
Hawaiian for "jumping flea" as it is also the Hawaiian for a certain
musical instrument that may be likened to a young guitar. It is my
opinion that the mountain ranch-house was named after the young
guitar. We were not in a hurry, and we spent the day at Ukulele,
learnedly discussing altitudes and barometers and shaking our
particular barometer whenever any one's argument stood in need of
demonstration. Our barometer was the most graciously acquiescent
instrument I have ever seen. Also, we gathered mountain
raspberries, large as hen's eggs and larger, gazed up the pasture-
covered lava slopes to the summit of Haleakala, forty-five hundred
feet above us, and looked down upon a mighty battle of the clouds
that was being fought beneath us, ourselves in the bright sunshine.
Every day and every day this unending battle goes on. Ukiukiu is
the name of the trade-wind that comes raging down out of the north-
east and hurls itself upon Haleakala. Now Haleakala is so bulky and
tall that it turns the north-east trade-wind aside on either hand,
so that in the lee of Haleakala no trade-wind blows at all.
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