And All The
While The Ragged Little Skirmishers, Stray And Detached, Sneak
Through The Trees And Canyons, Crawl Along And
Through the grass,
and surprise one another with unexpected leaps and rushes; while
above, far above, serene and lonely in
The rays of the setting sun,
Haleakala looks down upon the conflict. And so, the night. But in
the morning, after the fashion of trade-winds, Ukiukiu gathers
strength and sends the hosts of Naulu rolling back in confusion and
rout. And one day is like another day in the battle of the clouds,
where Ukiukiu and Naulu strive eternally on the slopes of Haleakala.
Again in the morning, it was boots and saddles, cow-boys, and
packhorses, and the climb to the top began. One packhorse carried
twenty gallons of water, slung in five-gallon bags on either side;
for water is precious and rare in the crater itself, in spite of the
fact that several miles to the north and east of the crater-rim more
rain comes down than in any other place in the world. The way led
upward across countless lava flows, without regard for trails, and
never have I seen horses with such perfect footing as that of the
thirteen that composed our outfit. They climbed or dropped down
perpendicular places with the sureness and coolness of mountain
goats, and never a horse fell or baulked.
There is a familiar and strange illusion experienced by all who
climb isolated mountains. The higher one climbs, the more of the
earth's surface becomes visible, and the effect of this is that the
horizon seems up-hill from the observer. This illusion is
especially notable on Haleakala, for the old volcano rises directly
from the sea without buttresses or connecting ranges. In
consequence, as fast as we climbed up the grim slope of Haleakala,
still faster did Haleakala, ourselves, and all about us, sink down
into the centre of what appeared a profound abyss. Everywhere, far
above us, towered the horizon. The ocean sloped down from the
horizon to us. The higher we climbed, the deeper did we seem to
sink down, the farther above us shone the horizon, and the steeper
pitched the grade up to that horizontal line where sky and ocean
met. It was weird and unreal, and vagrant thoughts of Simm's Hole
and of the volcano through which Jules Verne journeyed to the centre
of the earth flitted through one's mind.
And then, when at last we reached the summit of that monster
mountain, which summit was like the bottom of an inverted cone
situated in the centre of an awful cosmic pit, we found that we were
at neither top nor bottom. Far above us was the heaven-towering
horizon, and far beneath us, where the top of the mountain should
have been, was a deeper deep, the great crater, the House of the
Sun. Twenty-three miles around stretched the dizzy wells of the
crater. We stood on the edge of the nearly vertical western wall,
and the floor of the crater lay nearly half a mile beneath.
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