The horse-trail is not very wide.Like the engineer who built it, it dares anything.Where the ditch plunges through the mountain, it climbs over; and where the ditch leaps a gorge on a flume, the horse-trail takes advantage of the ditch and crosses on top of the flume.That careless trail thinks nothing of travelling up or down the faces of precipices.It gouges its narrow way out of the wall, dodging around waterfalls or passing under them where they thunder down in white fury; while straight overhead the wall rises hundreds of feet, and straight beneath it sinks a thousand.And those marvellous mountain horses are as unconcerned as the trail.They fox-trot along it as a matter of course, though the footing is slippery with rain, and they will gallop with their hind feet slipping over the edge if you let them.I advise only those with steady nerves and cool heads to tackle the Nahiku Ditch trail.One of our cow-boys was noted as the strongest and bravest on the big ranch.He had ridden mountain horses all his life on the rugged western slopes of Haleakala.He was first in the horse-breaking;and when the others hung back, as a matter of course, he would go in to meet a wild bull in the cattle-pen.He had a reputation.But he had never ridden over the Nahiku Ditch.It was there he lost his reputation.When he faced the first flume, spanning a hair-raising gorge, narrow, without railings, with a bellowing waterfall above, another below, and directly beneath a wild cascade, the air filled with driving spray and rocking to the clamour and rush of sound and motion--well, that cow-boy dismounted from his horse, explained briefly that he had a wife and two children, and crossed over on foot, leading the horse behind him.
The only relief from the flumes was the precipices; and the only relief from the precipices was the flumes, except where the ditch was far under ground, in which case we crossed one horse and rider at a time, on primitive log-bridges that swayed and teetered and threatened to carry away.I confess that at first I rode such places with my feet loose in the stirrups, and that on the sheer walls I saw to it, by a definite, conscious act of will, that the foot in the outside stirrup, overhanging the thousand feet of fall, was exceedingly loose.I say "at first"; for, as in the crater itself we quickly lost our conception of magnitude, so, on the Nahiku Ditch, we quickly lost our apprehension of depth.The ceaseless iteration of height and depth produced a state of consciousness in which height and depth were accepted as the ordinary conditions of existence; and from the horse's back to look sheer down four hundred or five hundred feet became quite commonplace and non-productive of thrills.And as carelessly as the trail and the horses, we swung along the dizzy heights and ducked around or through the waterfalls.
And such a ride! Falling water was everywhere.We rode above the clouds, under the clouds, and through the clouds! and every now and then a shaft of sunshine penetrated like a search-light to the depths yawning beneath us, or flashed upon some pinnacle of the crater-rim thousands of feet above.At every turn of the trail a waterfall or a dozen waterfalls, leaping hundreds of feet through the air, burst upon our vision.At our first night's camp, in the Keanae Gulch, we counted thirty-two waterfalls from a single viewpoint.The vegetation ran riot over that wild land.There were forests of koa and kolea trees, and candlenut trees; and then there were the trees called ohia-ai, which bore red mountain apples, mellow and juicy and most excellent to eat.Wild bananas grew everywhere, clinging to the sides of the gorges, and, overborne by their great bunches of ripe fruit, falling across the trail and blocking the way.And over the forest surged a sea of green life, the climbers of a thousand varieties, some that floated airily, in lacelike filaments, from the tallest branches others that coiled and wound about the trees like huge serpents; and one, the ei-ei, that was for all the world like a climbing palm, swinging on a thick stem from branch to branch and tree to tree and throttling the supports whereby it climbed.Through the sea of green, lofty tree-ferns thrust their great delicate fronds, and the lehua flaunted its scarlet blossoms.Underneath the climbers, in no less profusion, grew the warm-coloured, strangely-marked plants that in the United States one is accustomed to seeing preciously conserved in hot-houses.In fact, the ditch country of Maui is nothing more nor less than a huge conservatory.Every familiar variety of fern flourishes, and more varieties that are unfamiliar, from the tiniest maidenhair to the gross and voracious staghorn, the latter the terror of the woodsmen, interlacing with itself in tangled masses five or six feet deep and covering acres.
Never was there such a ride.For two days it lasted, when we emerged into rolling country, and, along an actual wagon-road, came home to the ranch at a gallop.I know it was cruel to gallop the horses after such a long, hard journey; but we blistered our hands in vain effort to hold them in.That's the sort of horses they grow on Haleakala.At the ranch there was great festival of cattle-driving, branding, and horse-breaking.Overhead Ukiukiu and Naulu battled valiantly, and far above, in the sunshine, towered the mighty summit of Haleakala.