It was near the Pali that I saw what I had never seen or heard of before—­a waterfall reversed, going up instead of down.  It suggested Stockton’s story of negative gravity.  A small brook comes down off the mountain and attempts to make the leap down a high precipice; but the winds catch it and carry it straight up in the air like smoke.  It is translated; it becomes a mere wraith hovering above the beetling crag.  Night and day this goes on, the wind snatching from the mountains in this summary way the water it has brought them.

On the walk with the Governor we made the acquaintance of some of the land shells for which these islands are famous—­pretty, pearl-like little whorls living on the largest trees, and about the size of a chipping sparrow’s egg, with pointed ends, variously colored.  There are more than two hundred species on the different islands, I think, each valley having varieties peculiar to itself, showing what a factor isolation is in the evolution of new species.  The Governor and his wife, and a young man who had specialized in conchology, plucked them from nearly every bush and tree; but my eye, being untrained in this kind of work, was very slow in finding them.

Coming down from these Hawaiian mountains is like coming out of a dripping tent of clouds into the clear, warm sunshine.  The change is most delightful.  Your clothing dries very quickly, and chilliness gives place to genial warmth.  And the prospects that open before you, the glimpses down into these deep, yellow-green, crater-like valleys, checkered with neat little Chinese farms, the panorama of the city and the sea unrolling as you come down, and always Diamond Head standing guard there to the east—­how the vision of it all lingers in the memory!

In climbing the heights, it was always a surprise to me to see the Pacific rise up as I rose, till it stood up like a great blue wall there against the horizon.  A level plain unrolls in the same way as we mount above it, but it does not produce the same illusion of rising up like a wall or a mountain-range; the blue, facile water cheats the eye.

One of the novel pleasures in which most travelers indulge while in Honolulu is surf-riding at Waikiki, near Diamond Head.  The sea, with a floor of lava and coral, is here shallow for a long distance out, and the surf comes in at intervals like a line of steeds cantering over a plain.  We went out in our bathing-suits in a long, heavy dugout, with a lusty native oarsman in each end.  When several hundred yards from shore, we saw, on looking seaward, the long, shining billows coming, whereupon our oarsmen headed the canoe toward shore, and plied their paddles with utmost vigor, uttering simultaneously a curious, excited cry.  In a moment the breaker caught us and, in some way holding us on its crest, shot us toward the shore like an arrow.  The sensation is novel and thrilling.  The foam flies; the waters leap about you.  You are coasting on the sea, and you shout with delight and pray for the sensation to continue.  But it is quickly over.  The hurrying breaker slips from under you, and leaves you in the trough, while it goes foaming on the shore.  Then you turn about and row out from the shore again, and wait for another chance to be shot toward the land on the foaming crest of a great Pacific wave.