Grant Allen - The White Man's Foot

"Yes," I answered boldly, telling the plain truth, "if you will allow me to say so, I'm very much afraid indeed. But I'm a man of science; I've got to do it; and I shall do it still till the lava comes down and drives us away bodily. And you? Aren't you afraid, too, of the stones and ashes?"

"No," she replied, though her tone belied her. "The eruptions never hurt my uncle nor me. You see, he's been accustomed to them from his childhood upward. In the old days, he was taught to think he was under Pélé's protection."

Frank looked up, imperturbable as ever. "For my part," he said, tossing the curls from his forehead, "I'm not a man of science, like Tom, you know; and I'm not under the protection of a heathen goddess, like you and your uncle, Kea; but I call it the grandest set of fireworks I ever saw in all my life – beats the Crystal Palace hollow – and I wouldn't have missed it for fifty pounds, I can tell you."

As for Kalaua, he stood sombre, alone, with folded arms and tight-pressed lips, looking down unmoved into the depths of the crater.

All night long we remained outside on the platform of the summit, watching and sketching that terrific convulsion. The mountain poured forth endless floods of lava. Heaven and earth were lighted up with its awful glow. Kalaua stood by us still, erect and grim, like one conscious that the fiery hail and the red-hot boulders had no terrors for him, and could not harm him. Kea, pale and tremulous, yet too brave at heart to flinch ever so, crouched by his side, too awestruck to speak in mute expectation. Frank alone seemed undisturbed by the appalling commotion going on around him. Boy enough to feel nothing of the terror of the moment, he was simply excited by the grandeur and magnificence of that wonderful pyrotechnic display. "It's the jolliest sight I ever saw, Tom," he exclaimed with delight more than once during the evening. "Why, to live here would be almost as good as to have a season-ticket all the year round for all the fêtes and gala-days in England!"

By morning however the eruption slackened; the internal fires had worn themselves out. "Pélé has grown tired of kicking up such a rumpus," Frank remarked cheerfully; and as he himself was tired of watching her, too, he proposed we should go in and rest ourselves a little after our arduous labours. Indeed, the lava was now almost ceasing to flow, and the bombardment of pumice-stone and fiery cinders had intermitted a little. We returned to the house, and flung ourselves down on our beds in the clothes we wore, too fatigued after our long and sleepless watch to trouble ourselves with the needless bother of undressing. When you've sat up all night observing an eruption, you don't much care about such luxuries of an advanced civilization as nightshirts. Before we retired however Kea brought us in a big bowl of fresh taro-paste, and on this simple food we made a most excellent and substantial breakfast. In ten minutes we were snoring so hard on our bamboo beds that I don't believe even another eruption would have roused us up, if it had thundered at our doors with one of its monstrous subterranean boulders.

It was five in the evening before we woke again. Frank stretched himself with a yawn. "I don't know how you feel, Tom," he cried as he jumped out of bed, "but I feel as if that extinct instrument, the rack, had been invented over again for my special benefit. There's not a bone in my body that isn't aching."

"What does that matter," I answered, "if science is satisfied? I've got the very finest sketch of a first-class eruption that ever was taken since seismology became a separate study."

"Bother seismology!" Frank exclaimed with a snort. "What a jolly long word for such a simple thing! As if one couldn't say straight out, earthquakes. For my part, what I want satisfied isn't science at all, but an internal yearning for some breakfast or some supper, whichever you choose to call it."

The supper was soon upon the board (for by this time the native servants had returned), and as soon as it was finished, we sallied forth, all four together, to inspect the changes wrought in the mountain by last night's events. The effects of the eruption were indeed prodigious. Great streams of fresh lava still lay dull and half-hot along the fertile valleys of the mountain side; and the ground about the house was strewn thick and deep with a white coat of powdery ashes. "This is splendid!" I said. "I shall have my work cut out for me now for several weeks. Nobody had ever a better chance afforded him of observing in detail the effects of a great volcanic effort."

Kalaua glanced grimly across at me as I spoke. "I wonder," he murmured, with a sort of sphinx-like sardonic smile, "you have escaped so safe to observe and report upon them."

"Ah, you see, chief," Frank answered carelessly, "he was under your protection. Pélé wouldn't hurt us, you know, as we were guests of a friend of hers. That was awfully nice of her. She's a perfect lady, as volcanoes go. I call her a most polite and obliging goddess."

Kalaua turned away with a half angry look. It was clear that, converted or unconverted, he considered the terrible deity of his fathers no proper subject for light chaff or jesting.

We spent the next six weeks pleasantly enough in the old man's house, observing and making notes upon the curious facts connected with the crater and its recent outbreak. I will not narrate my results here at full for fear of boring you – the more so, as I have already devoted two large volumes to the subject in the British Association Reports , Manchester Meeting. It will be enough for the present to mention that Frank and I thoroughly explored the whole top of the crater, as far as the first floor, which Kea had described to us as the Floor of the Strangers. We measured and mapped it out in every direction with theodolite and chain, and we made numerous interesting, and, I venture to add, important observations upon the most disputed points in the phenomena of eruptions. We knew our way about the Floor of the Strangers, in fact, as well as we knew our way down from our own home at Hampstead Heath to Charing Cross Station. Kalaua and Kea were surprised to find how accurately we had learnt the whole geography of the district; and Kalaua in particular seemed far from pleased at our perfect familiarity with the mountain and its ways, though he was much too polite ever to say so openly, holding his peace on the matter, at least to our faces, with true antique Hawaiian courtesy. For bland courtesy of demeanour, commend me to a cannibal.

One morning however about six weeks after our first arrival, I had occasion to send Frank by himself down to Hilo, on one of the sure-footed little mountain ponies, to fetch up some ropes and other articles we needed for our exploration from the stores in the town; and I said good-bye to him just outside the house, where Kalaua was seated, smoking a cigarette, and wrapped up as usual in his own stern and sombre reveries.

"Good-bye, old fellow,"' Frank cried in farewell, as he mounted his horse and cantered gaily off. "Mind you take care of yourself while I'm away. Give the crater a wide berth. Don't try to go exploring any further without me!"

"All right," I shouted back. "I won't get into mischief. Trust me for saving my own skin. I shall just potter about a bit to amuse myself alone on the outer edge of the Floor of the Strangers."

"What do you want the rope for?" Kalaua asked moodily, looking up from his cigarette as Frank rode away. "Better not go trusting yourself with any rope too far in the crater of Mauna Loa."

"I'm not afraid," I answered, with a short little laugh. "I want the rope to let myself down to the lower levels."

"What, the Floor of the Hawaiians?" the old chief cried with flashing eyes.