Next He Climbed Into The House Of The
Sun And Laid In Wait.
When the sun came tearing along the path,
bent on completing its journey in the shortest time possible, the
valiant youth threw his lariat around one of the sun's largest and
strongest beams.
He made the sun slow down some; also, he broke the
beam short off. And he kept on roping and breaking off beams till
the sun said it was willing to listen to reason. Maui set forth his
terms of peace, which the sun accepted, agreeing to go more slowly
thereafter. Wherefore Hina had ample time in which to dry her
kapas, and the days are longer than they used to be, which last is
quite in accord with the teachings of modern astronomy.
We had a lunch of jerked beef and hard poi in a stone corral, used
of old time for the night-impounding of cattle being driven across
the island. Then we skirted the rim for half a mile and began the
descent into the crater. Twenty-five hundred feet beneath lay the
floor, and down a steep slope of loose volcanic cinders we dropped,
the sure-footed horses slipping and sliding, but always keeping
their feet. The black surface of the cinders, when broken by the
horses' hoofs, turned to a yellow ochre dust, virulent in appearance
and acid of taste, that arose in clouds. There was a gallop across
a level stretch to the mouth of a convenient blow-hole, and then the
descent continued in clouds of volcanic dust, winding in and out
among cinder-cones, brick-red, old rose, and purplish black of
colour. Above us, higher and higher, towered the crater-walls,
while we journeyed on across innumerable lava-flows, turning and
twisting a devious way among the adamantine billows of a petrified
sea. Saw-toothed waves of lava vexed the surface of this weird
ocean, while on either hand arose jagged crests and spiracles of
fantastic shape. Our way led on past a bottomless pit and along and
over the main stream of the latest lava-flow for seven miles.
At the lower end of the crater was our camping spot, in a small
grove of olapa and kolea trees, tucked away in a corner of the
crater at the base of walls that rose perpendicularly fifteen
hundred feet. Here was pasturage for the horses, but no water, and
first we turned aside and picked our way across a mile of lava to a
known water-hole in a crevice in the crater-wall. The water-hole
was empty. But on climbing fifty feet up the crevice, a pool was
found containing half a dozen barrels of water. A pail was carried
up, and soon a steady stream of the precious liquid was running down
the rock and filling the lower pool, while the cow-boys below were
busy fighting the horses back, for there was room for one only to
drink at a time.
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