after on a mare. The sun smote us fair and full; the
air streamed from the hot rock, the distant landscape gleamed and
trembled through its vortices. On the left, the coast heaved bodily
upward to Mau, the zone of mists and forests, where it rains all day,
and the clouds creep up and down, and the groves loom and vanish in the
margin.

The land was still a crust of lava, here and there ramparted with
cliffs, and which here and there breaks down and shows the mouths of
branching galleries, mines and tombs of nature's making, endlessly
vaulted, and ramified below our passage. Wherever a house is,
cocoa-palms spring sheer out of the rock; a little shabby in this
northern latitude, not visibly the worse for their inclement rooting.
Hookena had shone out green under the black lip of the overhanging crag,
green as a May orchard; the lava might have been some rich black loam.
Everywhere, in the fissures of the rock, green herbs and flowering
bushes prospered; donkeys and cattle were everywhere; everywhere, too,
their whitened bones, telling of drought. No sound but of the sea
pervades this region; and it smells strong of the open water and of
aromatic plants.

We skirted one cliffy cove, full of bursting surges; and if it had not
been for the palms, and the houses, and the canoes that were putting out
to fish, and the colour of the cliffs and the bright dresses (lilac,
red, and green) of the women that sat about the doors at work, I might
have thought myself in Devonshire. A little further, we passed a garden
enclosed in dry stone walls from the surrounding blackness; it seemed a
wonder of fertility; hard by was the owner, a white man, waiting the
turn of the tide by the margin of his well; so soon as the sea flowed,
he might begin to irrigate with brackish water. The children hailed my
companion from wayside houses. With one little maid, knotting her gown
about her in embarrassment so as to define her little person like a suit
of tights, we held a conversation more prolonged. "Will you be at school
to-morrow?" "Yes, sir." "Do you like school?" "Yes, sir." "Do you like
bathing?" "No, ma'am," with a staggering change of sex. Another maiden,
of more tender growth and wholly naked, fled into the house at our
approach, and appeared again with a corner of a towel. Leaning one hand
on the post, and applying her raiment with the other, she stood in the
door and watched us haughtily. The white flag of a surveyor and a
pound-master's