I arose about two o’clock, and made my way out into the star-blazing night.  Such glory of the heavens I had never before seen.  I had never before been lifted up so near them, and hence had never before seen them through so rarefied an atmosphere.  The clouds and vapors had disappeared, and all the hosts of heaven were magnified.  The Milky Way seemed newly paved and swept.  There was no wind and no sound.  The mighty crater was a gulf of blackness, but the sky blazed with light.

The dawn comes early on such a mountain-top, and before four o’clock we were out under the fading stars.  As we had seen the day pass into night, surrounded by these wonderful scenes, now we saw the night pass into day, and the elemental grandeur on every hand reborn before us.  There was not a wisp of cloud or fog below us or about us to blur the great picture.  The sun came up from behind the vast, long, high wall of the Pacific that filled the eastern horizon, and the shadows fled from the huge pile of mountain in the west.  We hung about the rim of the great crater or sat upon the jagged rocks, wrapped in our blankets, till the sun was an hour high.

We got another glimpse of the band of goats picking their way from ledge to ledge far below us on the side of the crater.  I saw and heard two or three mina birds fly past, apparently seeking new territory to occupy.  These birds are more enterprising than the English sparrows, which also swarm in the island towns but do not brave the mountain-heights.  The bird from India seems at home everywhere.

After breakfast we still haunted for an hour or more the brink of the great abyss, where one seemed to feel the pulse of primal time, loath to tear ourselves away, loath also to take a last view of the panorama of land and sea, lit by the morning sun, which spread out far below us.  To the southeast we could dimly see the outlines of the island of Hawaii, with a faint gleam of snow on its great mountain Mauna Loa, nearly fourteen thousand feet high.  In the northwest a dim, dark mass low in the horizon marked the place of Oahu.  The ocean rose in the vast horizon and blended with the sky.  The eye could not tell where one ended and the other began.

The mules had had a comfortable night in a rude stone stable against the rocks, and were more eager to hit the down trail than were we.  The descent proved more fatiguing than the ascent, the constant plunging motion of the animals’ shoulders being a sore trial.  We dropped down through the belt of clouds that had begun to form, and out into the grassy region of the singing skylarks, past herds of grazing cattle, and at noon were again at Idlewild, resting our weary limbs and comforting the inner man.