Читать книгу The Pacific Triangle - Sydney Greenbie - Страница 22

An artist is delighted if he finds a study with a perfect hand or a beautiful neck; or, in nature, if a simple charm is left undisturbed by the confusion of human creation. Yet at night as our ship passed the island of Maui, it seemed to me that all the sweet simplicities that make life worth while had been assembled here in the beginning of the world and left untouched. The moon rose on the peak of the cone-shaped mountain, and for a time stood set, like a moonstone in a ring. The pyramid of night-blue earth was necklaced in street lights, which stretched their frilled reflections across the surface of the sea; and just back of it all lay the crater of Haleakala, the House of the Sun.

Photo, Otto C. Gilmore

A BLIZZARD OF FUMING HEAT

Photo, Otto C. Gilmore

WHERE THE TIDES TURN TO STONE

At sunrise next morning we were docked at Hilo on the island of Hawaii, two hundred miles from Honolulu. There was nothing here impressive to me, despite the waterfalls. For two and a half hours we drove by motor over the turtle-back surface of Hawaii toward Kilauea. Tree-ferns, palms, and plantations stretched in unending recession far and wide. A sense of mystery and awe crept slowly over me as we neared the region of the volcano. At eleven we arrived at the Volcano House.

Yet, in a mood of strange indifference I gazed across the five miles of flat, dark-brown frozen lava which is the roof of the crater. Ash-colored fumes rose from the field of fissures, like smoke from an underground village. Sullen, sallow vapors, these. Sulphur banks, tree molds cast in frozen lava, empty holes! Nothing within left to rot, but fringed with forests and brush, sulphur-stained or rooted in frozen lava. Everywhere promise of volcanic fury, prophecy of the end of the world.

The road lay like a border round the rim of an antique bowl which had been baked, cracked, chipped, but shaped to a usefulness that is beauty. All day long we waited, watching the clouds of gray fumes rise steadily, silently, and with a sad disinterestedness out of the mouth of the crater.

Frozen, the lava was the great bed of assurance, a rock of fearlessness. It seemed to say to the volcano: "I can be indifferent. Down there, deep down, is your limitation. Rise out of the pit and you become, like me, congealed. There, down in that deep, is your only hope of life. This great field of lifeless lava is proof of your effort to reach beyond your sphere. So why fear?" And there was no fear.

Photo, Otto C. Gilmore

THE LAKE OF SPOUTING MOLTEN LAVA

In the volcano of Kilauea. At night the white here shown is pink and terrifying

As night came on the gray fumes began to flush pink with the reflection of the heart of the crater. We set out in cars for the edge. Extinct craters yawned on every side, their walls deep and upright. Some were overgrown with green young trees, but as we came nearer to the living crater, life ceased. Great rolls of cloud-fumes rose from the gulch to wander away in silence. What a strange journey to take! From out a boiling pit where place is paid for by furious fighting, where pressure is father of fountains of boiling rock, out from struggle and howling fury, these gases rose into the world of living matter, into the world of wind and water. Out of the pit of destruction into the air, never ceasing, always stirring down there, rising to where life to us is death to it. The lava, seething, red, shoots aimlessly upward, only to quell its own futile striving in intermittent exhaustion.

We stood within a foot of the edge. Eight hundred feet below us the lava roared and spit. In the night, the entire volcano turned a pink glow, and before us lay three-quarters of a mile of Inferno come true. The red liquid heaves and hisses. Some of it shoots fully fifty feet into the air; some is still-born and forms a pillar of black stone in the midst of molten lava. From the other corner a steady stream of lava issues into the main pool, and the whole thumps and thuds and sputters and spouts, restless, toiling eternally.

On our way to the crater we were talkative. We joked, burnt paper over the cracks, discussed volcanic action, and expressed opinions about death and the probability of animal consciousness after death. But as we turned away from the pit we fell silent. It was as though we had looked into the unknown and had seen that which was not meant for man to see. And the clouds of fumes continued to issue calmly, unperturbed, with a dreadful persistence.

Just as our car groped its way through the mists to the bend in the road, a Japanese stepped before us with his hands outstretched. "Help!" he shouted. "Man killed." We rushed to his assistance and found that a party of Japanese in a Ford had run off the road and dropped into a shallow crater. Down on the frozen bed below huddled a group of men, women, and children, terrified. As we crawled down we found one Japanese sitting with the body of his dead companion in his arms, pressing his hot face against the cold cheek of his comrade. A chill drizzle swept down into the dark pit. It was a scene to horrify a stoic. To the wretched group our coming was a comfort the richness of which one could no more describe than one could the torture of lava in that pit over yonder.

Japanese are said to be fatalists. They hover about Kilauea year in and year out. One man sat with a baby in his arms, his feet dangling over the volcano. Playfully he pretended to toss the child in, and it accepted all as play. The same confidence the dead man had had in the driver whose carelessness had overturned the car. And now it seemed that his body belonged in the larger pit at which he had marveled not more than half an hour earlier.

As I look back into the pit of memory where the molten material, experience, has its ebb and flow, I can still see the seething of rock within a cup of stone, the boiling of nature within its own bosom. Where can one draw the line between experience past and present? Wherever I am, the shooting of that fountain of lava is as real as it was to me then; nor can conglomerate noises drown out the sound of lava pouring back into lava, of undermined rock projections crashing with a hissing sound back upon themselves. It is to me like the sound of voices when King Kamehameha I forced the natives of the island of Oahu over the Pali, and the group of terrified Japanese were like the fish in the coral caves at Kaneohe when aware of the approach of a fish that feeds upon them.

Yet there is a sound rising clear in memory, perhaps more wonderful even than the shrieking of tortured human beings or the hissing of molten lava. As I stood upon the rim of Halemaumau there arose the vision of Kapiolani, the Hawaiian girl who, defying superstition, ventured down into the jaws of the crater and by her courage exorcised Kilauea of its devils. What in all the world is more wonderful than frailty imbued with passion mothering achievement? Kapiolani may be called Hawaii's Joan of Arc. Unable to measure her strength with men, she defied their gods. A world of prejudice, all the world to her, stood between her and Kilauea. Courage triumphant had conquered fear. In defiance of her clan and of her own terror, she was the first native to approach the crater, and in that she made herself the equal of Kilauea. As she cast away the Hawaiian idols, herself emerged an idol.