We climbed the crater-walls, put the horses over impossible places, rolled stones, and shot wild goats.I did not get any goats.I was too busy rolling stones.One spot in particular I remember, where we started a stone the size of a horse.It began the descent easy enough, rolling over, wobbling, and threatening to stop; but in a few minutes it was soaring through the air two hundred feet at a jump.It grew rapidly smaller until it struck a slight slope of volcanic sand, over which it darted like a startled jackrabbit, kicking up behind it a tiny trail of yellow dust.Stone and dust diminished in size, until some of the party said the stone had stopped.That was because they could not see it any longer.It had vanished into the distance beyond their ken.Others saw it rolling farther on--I know I did; and it is my firm conviction that that stone is still rolling.
Our last day in the crater, Ukiukiu gave us a taste of his strength.
He smashed Naulu back all along the line, filled the House of the Sun to overflowing with clouds, and drowned us out.Our rain-gauge was a pint cup under a tiny hole in the tent.That last night of storm and rain filled the cup, and there was no way of measuring the water that spilled over into the blankets.With the rain-gauge out of business there was no longer any reason for remaining; so we broke camp in the wet-gray of dawn, and plunged eastward across the lava to the Kaupo Gap.East Maui is nothing more or less than the vast lava stream that flowed long ago through the Kaupo Gap; and down this stream we picked our way from an altitude of six thousand five hundred feet to the sea.This was a day's work in itself for the horses; but never were there such horses.Safe in the bad places, never rushing, never losing their heads, as soon as they found a trail wide and smooth enough to run on, they ran.There was no stopping them until the trail became bad again, and then they stopped of themselves.Continuously, for days, they had performed the hardest kind of work, and fed most of the time on grass foraged by themselves at night while we slept, and yet that day they covered twenty-eight leg-breaking miles and galloped into Hana like a bunch of colts.Also, there were several of them, reared in the dry region on the leeward side of Haleakala, that had never worn shoes in all their lives.Day after day, and all day long, unshod, they had travelled over the sharp lava, with the extra weight of a man on their backs, and their hoofs were in better condition than those of the shod horses.
The scenery between Vieiras's (where the Kaupo Gap empties into the sea) and Lana, which we covered in half a day, is well worth a week or month; but, wildly beautiful as it is, it becomes pale and small in comparison with the wonderland that lies beyond the rubber plantations between Hana and the Honomanu Gulch.Two days were required to cover this marvellous stretch, which lies on the windward side of Haleakala.The people who dwell there call it the "ditch country," an unprepossessing name, but it has no other.
Nobody else ever comes there.Nobody else knows anything about it.
With the exception of a handful of men, whom business has brought there, nobody has heard of the ditch country of Maui.Now a ditch is a ditch, assumably muddy, and usually traversing uninteresting and monotonous landscapes.But the Nahiku Ditch is not an ordinary ditch.The windward side of Haleakala is serried by a thousand precipitous gorges, down which rush as many torrents, each torrent of which achieves a score of cascades and waterfalls before it reaches the sea.More rain comes down here than in any other region in the world.In 1904 the year's downpour was four hundred and twenty inches.Water means sugar, and sugar is the backbone of the territory of Hawaii, wherefore the Nahiku Ditch, which is not a ditch, but a chain of tunnels.The water travels underground, appearing only at intervals to leap a gorge, travelling high in the air on a giddy flume and plunging into and through the opposing mountain.This magnificent waterway is called a "ditch," and with equal appropriateness can Cleopatra's barge be called a box-car.
There are no carriage roads through the ditch country, and before the ditch was built, or bored, rather, there was no horse-trail.
Hundreds of inches of rain annually, on fertile soil, under a tropic sun, means a steaming jungle of vegetation.A man, on foot, cutting his way through, might advance a mile a day, but at the end of a week he would be a wreck, and he would have to crawl hastily back if he wanted to get out before the vegetation overran the passage way he had cut.O'Shaughnessy was the daring engineer who conquered the jungle and the gorges, ran the ditch and made the horse-trail.He built enduringly, in concrete and masonry, and made one of the most remarkable water-farms in the world.Every little runlet and dribble is harvested and conveyed by subterranean channels to the main ditch.But so heavily does it rain at times that countless spillways let the surplus escape to the sea.