Oh, the long suffering of him who threads a narrow trail over the brown crust of a hill where the short grass lies flat in tropical sunshine! On one side sleeps the blue, monotonous sea; on the other, crags clothe themselves in cool mist and look dreamy and solemn.
The boy Kahéle, who has no ambition beyond the bit of his foot-sore mustang, lags behind, taking all the dust with commendable resignation.
As for me, I am wet through with the last shower; I steam in the fierce noonday heat. I spur Hoké the mule into the shadow of a great cloud that drifts lazily overhead, and am grateful for this unsatisfying shade as long as it lasts. I watch the sea, swinging my whip by its threadbare lash like a pendulum,--the sea, where a very black rock is being drowned over and over by the tremendous swell that covers it for a moment; but somehow the rock comes to the surface again, and seems to gasp horribly in a deluge of breakers. That rock has been drowning for centuries, yet its struggle for life is as real as ever.
I watch the mountains, cleft with green, fern-cushioned chasms, where an occasional stream silently distills. Far up on a sun-swept ledge a white, scattering drift, looking like a rose-garden after a high wind, I know to be a flock of goats feeding. But the wind-dried and sunburnt grass under foot, the intangible dust that pervades the air, the rain-cloud in the distance, trailing its banners of crape in the sea as it bears down upon us,--these are what fret me a little, and make life a burden for the time being; so I spur my faithless Hoké up a new ascent as forbidding as any that we have yet come upon, and slowly and with many pauses creep to the summit.
Kahéle, "the goer," belies his name, for he loiters everywhere and always; yet I am not sorry. I have the first glimpse of Wailua all to myself. I am not obliged to betray my emotion, which is a bore of the worst sort.
Wailua lies at my feet,--a valley full of bees, butterflies, and blossoms, the sea fawning at the mouth of it, the clouds melting over it; waterfalls gushing from numerous green corners; silver-white phaëtons floating in mid-air, at a loss to choose between earth and heaven, though evidently a little inclined earthward, for they no sooner drift out of the bewildering bowers of Wailua than they return again with noticeable haste.