s tunnelled with corridors and halls; under
houses high on the mountain, the sea can be heard throbbing in the
bowels of the land; and there is one gallery of miles, which has been
used by armies as a pass. Streams are thus unknown. The rain falls
continually in the highlands: an isle that rises nearly fourteen
thousand feet sheer from the sea could never fail of rain; but the
treasure is squandered on a sieve; and by sunless conduits returns
unseen into the ocean. Corrugated slopes of lava, bristling lava cliffs,
spouts of metallic clinkers, miles of coast without a well or rivulet;
scarce anywhere a beach, nowhere a harbour: here seems a singular land
to be contended for in battle as a seat for courts and princes. Yet it
possessed in the eyes of the natives one more than countervailing
advantage. The windward shores of the isle are beaten by a monstrous
surf; there are places where goods and passengers must be hauled up and
lowered by a rope, there are coves which even the daring boatmen of
Hamakua dread to enter; and men live isolated in their hamlets or
communicate by giddy footpaths in the cliff. Upon the side of Kona, the
table-like margin of the lava affords almost everywhere a passage by
land; and the waves, reduced by the vast breakwater of the island, allow
an almost continual communication by way of sea.

Yet even here the surf of the Pacific appears formidable to the stranger
as he lands, and daily delights him with its beauty as he walks the
shore.

It was on a Saturday afternoon that the steamer _Hall_ conveyed me to
Hookena. She was charged with tourists on their way to the volcano; and
I found it hard to justify my choice of a week in an unheard-of hamlet,
rather than a visit to one of the admitted marvels of the world. I do
not know that I can justify it now and to a larger audience. I should
prefer, indeed, to have seen both; but I was at the time embarrassed
with arrears of work; it was imperative that I should choose; and I
chose one week in a Kona village and another in the lazaretto, and
renounced the craters of Maunaloa and Haleakala. For there are some so
constituted as to find a man or a society more curious than the highest
mountain; some, in whom the lava foreshores of Kona and Kau will move as
deep a wonder as the fiery vents that made them what they are.

The land and sea breezes alternate on the Kona coast with regularity;
and the veil of rain draws up and down the talus of the mountain,