The aspect of the sea was so completely lazy, that it was a fresh
surprise as each indolent undulation touched the shore that it had
latent vigour left to throw itself upwards into clouds of spray. We
looked through limpid water into cool depths where strange bright
fish darted through the submarine chapparal, but the coolness was
imaginary, for the water was at 80. degrees {47} The air above the
great black lava flood, which in prehistoric times had flowed into
the sea, and had ever since declined the kindly draping offices of
nature, vibrated in waves of heat. Even the imperishable cocoanut
trees, whose tall, bare, curved trunks rose from the lava or the
burnt red earth, were gaunt, tattered, and thirsty-looking, weary of
crying for moisture to the pitiless skies. At last the ceaseless
ripple of talk ceased, crew and passengers slept on the hot deck,
and no sounds were heard but the drowsy flap of the awning, and the
drowsier creak of the rudder, as the Kilauea swayed sleepily on the
lazy undulations. The flag drooped and fainted with heat. The
white sun blazed like a magnesium light on blue water, black lava,
and fiery soil, roasting, blinding, scintillating, and flushed the
red rocks of Maui into glory. It was a constant marvel that troops
of mounted natives, male and female, could gallop on the scorching
shore without being melted or shrivelled. It is all glorious, this
fierce bright glow of the Tropic of Cancer, yet it was a relief to
look up the great rolling featureless slopes above Ulupalakua to a
forest belt of perennial green, watered, they say, by perpetual
showers, and a little later to see a mountain summit uplifted into a
region of endless winter, above a steady cloud-bank as white as
snow. This mountain, Haleakala, the House of the Sun, is the
largest extinct volcano in the world, its terminal crater being
nineteen miles in circumference at a height of more than 10,000