I advise you to take this way back.  Almost the whole of it is a land of desolation.  A narrow trail across unceasing beds of lava, a trail which in spots was actually hammered down to make it smooth enough for horses’ feet, and outside of whose limits in most places your horse will refuse to go, because he knows it is too rough for beast or man:  this is your road.  Most of the lava is probably very ancient, though some is quite recent; and ferns and guava bushes and other scanty herbage grow through it.

In some of the cavernous holes, which denote probably ancient cones or huge lava bubbles, you will see a cocoa-nut-tree or a pandanus trying to subsist; and by-and-by, after a descent to the sea-shore, you are rewarded with the pleasant sight of groves of cocoa-nuts and umbrageous arbors of pandanus, and occasionally with a patch of green.

Almost the whole of the Puna coast is waterless.  From the Volcano House you take with you not only food for the journey back to Hilo, but water in bottles; and your thirsty animals get none until you reach the end of your first day’s journey, at Kaimu.  Here, also, you can send a more than half-naked native into the trees for cocoa-nuts, and drink your fill of their refreshing milk, while your jaded horses swallow bucketfuls of rain-water.

[Illustration:  HILO.]

It will surprise you to find people living among the lava, making potato-patches in it, planting coffee and some fruit-trees in it, fencing in their small holdings, even, with lava blocks.  Very little soil is needed to give vegetation a chance in a rainy reason, and the decomposed lava makes a rich earth.  But except the cocoa-nut which grows on the beach, and seems to draw its sustenance from the waves, and the sweet-potato, which does very well among the lava, nothing seems really to thrive.

It will add much to the pleasure of your journey to Kilauea if you carry with you, to read upon the spot and along the road, Brigham’s valuable Memoir on the Hawaiian Volcanoes.  With this in hand, you will comprehend the nature, and know also the very recent date of some important changes, caused by earthquakes and lava flows, on the Puna coast.  Near and at Kaimu, for instance, there has been an apparent subsidence of the land, which is supposed in reality, however, I believe, to have been caused rather by the breaking off of a vast lava ledge or overhang, on which, covered as it was with earth and trees, a considerable population had long lived.  In front of the native house in which you will sleep, at Kaimu, part of a large grove of cocoa-nut-trees was thus submerged, and you may see the dead stumps still sticking up out of the surf.