Honolulu, 1873 (Page 3)

As we emerged on the broad road which leads up the Nuuanu Valley to the mountains, we saw many patches of this kalo, a very handsome tropical plant, with large leaves of a bright, tender green. Each plant was growing on a small hillock, with water round it. There were beautiful vegetable gardens also, in which Chinamen raise for sale not only melons, pineapples, sweet potatoes, and other edibles of hot climates, but the familiar fruits and vegetables of the temperate zones.

In patches of surpassing neatness there were strawberries, which are ripe here all the year, peas, carrots, turnips, asparagus, lettuce, and celery. I saw no other plants or trees which grow at home, but recognized as hardly less familiar growths the Victorian eucalyptus, which has not had time to become gaunt and straggling, the Norfolk Island pine, which grows superbly here, and the handsome Moreton Bay fig.

But the chief feature of this road is the number of residences; I had almost written of pretentious residences, but the term would be a base slander, as I have jumped to the conclusion that the twin vulgarities of ostentation and pretense have no place here. But certainly for a mile and a half or more there are many very comfortable looking dwellings, very attractive to the eye, with an ease and imperturbable serenity of demeanor as if they had nothing to fear from heat, cold, wind, or criticism.

Their architecture is absolutely unostentatious, and their one beauty is that they are embowered among trailers, shadowed by superb exotics and surrounded by banks of flowers, while the stately coconut, the banana, and the candlenut, the aborigines of Oahu, are nowhere displaced.

One house with extensive grounds, a perfect wilderness of vegetation, was pointed out as the summer palace of Queen Emma, or Kaleleonalani, widow of Kamehameha IV, who visited England a few years ago, and the finest garden of all is that of a much respected Chinese merchant named Afong.

Oahu, at least on this leeward side, is not tropical-looking, and all this tropical variety and luxuriance which delight the eye result from foreign enthusiasm and love of beauty and shade.

When we ascended above the scattered dwellings and had passed the tasteful mausoleum, with two tall kahilis, or feather plumes, at the door of the tomb in which the last of the Kamehamehas received Christian burial, the vegetation ceased.

At that height a shower of rain falls on nearly every day in the year, and the result is a greensward which England can hardly rival, a perfect sea of verdure, darkened in the valley and more than halfway up the hillsides by the foliage of the yellow-blossomed and almost impenetrable hibiscus, brightened here and there by the pea-green candlenut.

Streamlets leap from crags and ripple along the roadside, every rock and stone is hidden by moist-looking ferns, as aerial and delicate as marabou feathers, and when the windings of the valley and the projecting spurs of mountains shut out all indications of Honolulu, in the cool green loneliness one could imagine oneself in the temperate zones.

The peculiarity of the scenery is that the hills, which rise to a height of about four thousand feet, are wall-like ridges of gray or colored rock, rising precipitously out of the trees and grass, and that these walls are broken up into pinnacles and needles. At the Pali (wall-like precipice), the summit of the ascent of a thousand feet, we left our buggy, and passing through a gash in the rock, the celebrated view burst on us with overwhelming effect.

Immense masses of black and ferruginous volcanic rock, hundreds of feet in nearly perpendicular height, formed the pali on either side, and the ridge extended northward for many miles, presenting a lofty, abrupt mass of gray rock broken into fantastic pinnacles, which seemed to pierce the sky. A broad, umbrageous mass of green clothed the lower buttresses and fringed itself away in clusters of coco palms on a gardenlike stretch below, green with grass and sugar cane, and dotted with white houses, each with its palm and banana grove, and varied by eminences which looked like long-extinct tufa cones.

Beyond this enchanted region stretched the coral reef, with its white wavy line of endless surf, and the broad blue Pacific, ruffled by a breeze whose icy freshness chilled us where we stood.

Narrow streaks on the landscape, every now and then disappearing behind intervening hills, indicated bridle tracks connected with a frightfully steep and rough zigzag path cut out of the face of the cliff on our right. I could not go down this on foot without a sense of insecurity, but mounted natives driving loaded horses descended with perfect impunity into the dreamland below.

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