Kaimu is twenty-five miles from the Volcano House.  The native house at which you will pass the night is clean, and you may there enjoy the novelty of sleeping on Hawaiian mats, and under the native cover of tapa.  You must bring with you tea or coffee, sugar, and bread, and such other food as is necessary to your comfort.  Sweet-potatoes and bananas, and chickens caught after you arrive, with abundant cocoa-nuts, are the supplies of the place.  The water is not good, and you will probably drink only cocoa-nut milk, until, fifteen miles farther on, at Captain Eldart’s, you find a pleasant and comfortable resting-place for the second night, with a famous natural warm bath, very slightly mineral.  Thence a ride of twenty-three miles brings you back to Hilo, all of it over lava, most of it through a sterile country, but with one small burst of a real paradise of tropical luxuriance, a mile of tall forest and jungle, which looks more like Brazil than Hawaii.

One advantage of returning by way of the Puna coast, rather than by the direct route from Kilauea, is that you have clear, bright weather all the way.  The configuration of the coast makes Puna sunny while Hilo is rainy.

If you desire a longer ride than that by the Puna coast, you can cross the island, from the Volcano House, by way of Waiahino and Kapapala to Kauwaloa on the western coast, whence a schooner will bear you back to Honolulu.  A brief study of the map of Hawaii in this volume will show the different routes suggested in this chapter.

Moreover, when you are at Kilauea, you have done something toward the ascent of Mauna Loa; and guides, provisions, and animals for that enterprise can be obtained at the Volcano House, as well as such ample details of the route that I will not here attempt any directions.  It is not an easy ride; and you must carry with you warm clothing.  A gentleman who slept at the summit in September, 1873, told me the ice made over two inches thick during the night.

If Mauna Loa is active, a traveler on the Islands ought by all means to see it; for Dr. Coan assures me that it is then one of the most terrific and grand sights imaginable.  I did not visit it, as it was not active while I was on the Islands, though its fires were alive.  The crater is a pit about three miles in circumference, with precipitous banks about two thousand feet deep.  At the bottom is the burning lake, which has a curious habit of throwing up a jet, more or less constant, of fiery lava, to the height, this last summer, of four or five hundred feet from the surface of the lake.  It is a fine sight, but, of course, somewhat distant.  I am told that this jet has at times reached nearly to the summit level of the crater; and it must then have been a glorious spectacle.

[Illustration:  SURF BATHING.]