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.
He had a reputation. But he
had never ridden over the Nahiku Ditch. It was there he lost his
reputation. When he faced the first flume, spanning a hair-raising
gorge, narrow, without railings, with a bellowing waterfall above,
another below, and directly beneath a wild cascade, the air filled
with driving spray and rocking to the clamour and rush of sound and
motion - well, that cow-boy dismounted from his horse, explained
briefly that he had a wife and two children, and crossed over on
foot, leading the horse behind him.
The only relief from the flumes was the precipices; and the only
relief from the precipices was the flumes, except where the ditch
was far under ground, in which case we crossed one horse and rider
at a time, on primitive log-bridges that swayed and teetered and
threatened to carry away. I confess that at first I rode such
places with my feet loose in the stirrups, and that on the sheer
walls I saw to it, by a definite, conscious act of will, that the
foot in the outside stirrup, overhanging the thousand feet of fall,
was exceedingly loose. I say "at first"; for, as in the crater
itself we quickly lost our conception of magnitude, so, on the
Nahiku Ditch, we quickly lost our apprehension of depth. The
ceaseless iteration of height and depth produced a state of
consciousness in which height and depth were accepted as the
ordinary conditions of existence; and from the horse's back to look
sheer down four hundred or five hundred feet became quite
commonplace and non-productive of thrills. And as carelessly as the
trail and the horses, we swung along the dizzy heights and ducked
around or through the waterfalls.
And such a ride! Falling water was everywhere. We rode above the
clouds, under the clouds, and through the clouds! and every now and
then a shaft of sunshine penetrated like a search-light to the
depths yawning beneath us, or flashed upon some pinnacle of the
crater-rim thousands of feet above. At every turn of the trail a
waterfall or a dozen waterfalls, leaping hundreds of feet through
the air, burst upon our vision. At our first night's camp, in the
Keanae Gulch, we counted thirty-two waterfalls from a single
viewpoint. The vegetation ran riot over that wild land. There were
forests of koa and kolea trees, and candlenut trees; and then there
were the trees called ohia-ai, which bore red mountain apples,
mellow and juicy and most excellent to eat. Wild bananas grew
everywhere, clinging to the sides of the gorges, and, overborne by
their great bunches of ripe fruit, falling across the trail and
blocking the way.
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