the extinct crater
of Haleakala, ten thousand feet above the sea, and gaze down into
its awful crater, 27 miles in circumference and ago feet deep, and to
picture to yourself the seething world of fire that once swept up out of
the tremendous abyss ages ago.

The prodigious funnel is dead and silent now, and even has bushes
growing far down in its bottom, where the deep-sea line could hardly
have reached in the old times, when the place was filled with liquid
lava. These bushes look like parlor shrubs from the summit where you
stand, and the file of visitors moving through them on their mules is
diminished to a detachment of mice almost; and to them you, standing so
high up against the sun, ten thousand feet above their heads, look no
larger than a grasshopper.

This in the morning; but at three or four in the afternoon a thousand
little patches of white clouds, like handfuls of wool, come drifting
noiselessly, one after another, into the crater, like a procession of
shrouded phantoms, and circle round and round the vast sides, and settle
gradually down and mingle together until the colossal basin is filled
to the brim with snowy fog and all its seared and desolate wonders are
hidden from sight.

And then you may turn your back to the crater and look far away upon the
broad valley below, with its sugar-houses glinting like white specks in
the distance, and the great sugar-fields diminished to green veils amid
the lighter-tinted verdure around them, and abroad upon the limitless
ocean. But I should not say you look down; you look up at these things.

You are ten thousand feet above them, but yet you seem to stand in a
basin, with the green islands here and there, and the valleys and the
wide ocean, and the remote snow-peak of Mauna Loa, all raised up before
and above you, and pictured out like a brightly tinted map hung at the
ceiling of a room.

You look up at everything; nothing is below you. It has a singular
and startling effect to see a miniature world thus seemingly hung in
mid-air.

But soon the white clouds come trooping along in ghostly squadrons and
mingle together in heavy masses a quarter of a mile below you and
shut out everything-completely hide the sea and all the earth save the
pinnacle you stand on. As far as the eye can reach, it finds nothing
to rest upon but a boundless plain of clouds tumbled into all manner of
fantastic shapes-a billowy ocean of wool aflame with the gold and purple
and crim