V

HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

I

On the edge of the world my islands lie,” sings Mrs. Frear in her little lyric on the Hawaiian Islands.

    “On the edge of the world my islands lie,
     Under the sun-steeped sky;
       And their waving palms
       Are bounteous alms
     To the soul-spent passer-by.

    “On the edge of the world my islands sleep
     In a slumber soft and deep. 
       What should they know
       Of a world of woe,
     And myriad men that weep?”

On the rim of the world my fancy seemed to see them that May day when we went aboard the huge Pacific steamship in San Francisco Harbor, and she pointed her prow westward toward the vast wilderness of the Pacific—­on the edge of the world, looking out and down across the vast water toward Asia and Australia.  I wondered if the great iron ship could find them, and if we should realize or visualize the geography or the astronomy when we got there, and see ourselves on the huge rotundity of the globe not far above her equatorial girdle.

Yes, on the rim of the world they lie to the traveler steaming toward them, and on the rim of the world they lie in his memory after his return, basking there in that tropical sunlight, forever fanned by those cooling trade winds, and encompassed by that morning-glory sea.  With my mind’s eye I behold them rising from that enormous abyss of the Pacific, fire-born and rain-carved, vast volcanic mountains miles deep under the sea, and in some cases miles high above it, clothed with verdure and teeming with life, the scene of long-gone cosmic strife and destruction, now the abode of rural and civic peace and plenty.

The Pacific treated me so much better than the Atlantic ever had that I am probably inclined to overestimate everything I saw on the voyage.  It was the first trip at sea that ever gave me any pleasure.  The huge vessels are in themselves a great comfort, and in the placid waters and the sliding down the rotund side of the great globe under warmer and warmer skies one gains a very agreeable experience.  The first day’s run must have carried us out and over that huge Pacific abyss, the Tuscarora Deep, where there were nearly four miles of water under us.  Some of our aeroplanes have gone up half that distance and disappeared from sight.  I fancy that our ship, more than six hundred feet long, would have appeared a very small object, floating across this briny firmament, could one have looked up at it from the bottom of that sea.

The Hawaiian Islands rise from the border of that vast deep, and one can fancy how that huge pot must have boiled back in Tertiary times, when the red-hot lava of which they are mainly built up was poured from the interior of the globe.