“Early in 1866, George Barnes invited [Mark Twain] to resign [his] reportership on his paper, the San Francisco Morning Call, and for some months thereafter, [he] was without money or work; then [he] had a pleasant turn of fortune.”
“The proprietors of the Sacramento Union, a great and influential daily journal, sent [Twain] to the Sandwich Islands to write four letters a month at twenty dollars a piece.”
He also wrote books about some of his travels (that included a visit to Hawai‘i) … one such, Roughing It. Here are some of his comments about a visit to Kilauea Volcano – from that series, as well as his other writing.
“Monday morning we were close to the island of Hawaii. Two of its high mountains were in view – Mauna Loa and Hualaiai. The latter is an imposing peak, but being only ten thousand feet high is seldom mentioned or heard of.”
“The rays of glittering snow and ice, that clasped [Maua Loa’s] summit like a claw, looked refreshing when viewed from the blistering climate we were in.”
“One could stand on that mountain (wrapped up in blankets and furs to keep warm), and while he nibbled a snowball or an icicle to quench his thirst he could look down the long sweep of its sides and see spots where plants are growing that grow only where the bitter cold of Winter prevails …”
“… lower down he could see sections devoted to production that thrive in the temperate zone alone; and at the bottom of the mountain he could see the home of the tufted cocoa-palms and other species of vegetation that grow only in the sultry atmosphere of eternal Summer.”
“He could see all the climes of the world at a single glance of the eye, and that glance would only pass over a distance of four or five miles as the bird flies!”
We “sailed down to Kau, where we disembarked and took final leave of the vessel. Next day we bought horses and bent our way over the summer-clad mountain-terraces, toward the great volcano of Kilauea (Ke-low-way-ah).”
“We made nearly a two days’ journey of it, but that was on account of laziness. Toward sunset on the second day, we reached an elevation of some four thousand feet above sea level, and as we picked our careful way through billowy wastes of lava long generations ago stricken dead and cold in the climax of its tossing fury …”
“… we began to come upon signs of the near presence of the volcano – signs in the nature of ragged fissures that discharged jets of sulphurous vapor into the air, hot from the molten ocean down in the bowels of the mountain.”
“I was disappointed when I saw the great volcano of Kilauea to‐day for the first time. It is a comfort to me to know that I fully expected to be disappointed, however, and so, in one sense at least, I was not disappointed.”
“I said to myself ‘Only a considerable hole in the ground ‐ nothing to Haleakala ‐ a wide, level, black plain in the bottom of it, and a few little sputtering jets of fire occupying a place about as large as an ordinary potato‐patch, up in one corner ‐ no smoke to amount to anything.’”
“I reflected that night was the proper time to view a volcano … I turned my eyes upon the volcano again (now, at night.)”
“Perched upon the edge of the crater, at the opposite end from where we stood, was a small look-out house – say three miles away. It assisted us, by comparison, to comprehend and appreciate the great depth of the basin – it looked like a tiny martin-box clinging at the eaves of a cathedral.”
“Arrived at the little thatched look out house, we rested our elbows on the railing in front and looked abroad over the wide crater and down over the sheer precipice at the seething fires beneath us.”
“The view was a startling improvement on my daylight experience. I turned to see the effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of men I almost ever saw.”
“In the strong light every countenance glowed like red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity! The place below looked like the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up on a furlough.
“I turned my eyes upon the volcano again. The ‘cellar’ was tolerably well lighted up. For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated …”
“You could imagine those lights the width of a continent away – and that hidden under the intervening darkness were hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert – and even then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on, and on!–to the fires and far beyond!”
“You could not compass it – it was the idea of eternity made tangible – and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye!”
“The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire!”
“It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it–imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled net-work of angry fire!”
“Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter, broken in the dark crust, and in them the melted lava–the color a dazzling white just tinged with yellow–was boiling and surging furiously …”
“… and from these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like the spokes of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while and then swept round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession of sharp worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the fiercest jagged lightning.”
“These streams met other streams, and they mingled with and crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction, like skate tracks on a popular skating ground.”
“Sometimes streams twenty or thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing –and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down small, steep hills and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their source, but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with alternate lines of black and gold.”
“Some of the streams preferred to mingle together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then they looked something like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship’s deck when she has just taken in sail and dropped anchor–provided one can imagine those ropes on fire.”
“Through the glasses, the little fountains scattered about looked very beautiful. They boiled, and coughed, and spluttered, and discharged sprays of stringy red fire–of about the consistency of mush, for instance–from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along with a shower of brilliant white sparks–a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood and snow-flakes!”
“We had circles and serpents and streaks of lightning all twined and wreathed and tied together, without a break throughout an area more than a mile square (that amount of ground was covered, though it was not strictly “square”) …”
“… and it was with a feeling of placid exultation that we reflected that many years had elapsed since any visitor had seen such a splendid display …”
“I forgot to say that the noise made by the bubbling lava is not great, heard as we heard it from our lofty perch. It makes three distinct sounds–a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or puffing sound …”
“… and if you stand on the brink and close your eyes it is no trick at all to imagine that you are sweeping down a river on a large low-pressure steamer, and that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing from her escape-pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft her wheels. The smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.”
“We left the lookout house at ten o’clock in a half cooked condition, because of the heat from Pele’s furnaces, and wrapping up in blankets, for the night was cold, we returned to our Hotel.”
