woods and winds among trees and clumps of ferns, giving every now and then wonderful glimpses of the crater and of the superb mountain beyond. Along its edges grow little ohelo bushes, spangled with their refreshing fruit, the taste of blueberries but the size of small grapes, canary yellow, or pink, or carmine in colour. After about a mile and a half the road reaches the brink of Kilaueaiki, "Little Kilauea,'' a small extinct crater about half a mile across and 800 feet deep, with walls that are very precipitous, but covered with shrubbery and ferns and with a floor similar to that of the great crater. Its sides are lowest toward Kilauea, with which it seems almost to have been connected. A steep path leads down to the floor, a path almost perpendicular in places, but interesting and to be recommended for good climbers. This unexpected little crater is very beautiful, in looks much more what one would expect a volcano to be than is Kilauea itself. The road then circles closely the east bank of Kilaueaiki and turns westward through sparse growth toward the great crater. Before reaching the long spur down which it runs to the lake of fire, however, it passes another interesting little dead crater, Keanakakoe, "the cave for cutting axes," only about 400 feet deep and with a floor jet-black and polished, as smooth as the floor of a ballroom. When this pit ceased to be active the lava must have been at intense heat and therefore very liquid, so that, as it cooled, the surface was left without a ripple, with hardly a crack—none more than an inch wide—and as hard and glassy as obsidian. It was this brittle, impermeable rock, found also in the crater of the same name at the summit of Mauna Kea—that the Hawaiians used to make into weapons and agricultural implements. Even today the floor of the crater is strewn with half-finished axes and picks. The descent into Kilauea is easy, and the road continues across the hard lava floor almost to the edge of Halemaumau.
The whole vast floor of Kilauea is well worth exploring by daylight, but to one unaccustomed to surface indications it is safer to take a guide, as the crust in places is thin, and to break through would mean serious cuts on the sharp edges of the lava, in addition to the possibility of disaster, since one can never be sure in the crater of an active volcano as to what may be underneath any particular spot. The edges of the floor are interesting where the molten lava has piled up against the sides and then, cooling, has shrunk away, looking now like waves which have frozen into black ice on a beach. There are curious cones which not so very long ago spouted out smoke and sparks like great furnace blow-pipes. There are deep caves which can be explored with lanterns, tunnels through which flowed fiery streams and where the lava cooled in fantastic forms—caves which can be entered only for a certain distance since the heat in the ends toward Halemaumau is too great to be endured. Sometimes one finds masses of a kind of greenish lava foam thrown out at times of violent eruptions, a foam made of innumerable minute cells like honeycomb and as light as sea-foam. There are also in places wisps of "Pele's hair" caught on the ragged edges of rock, light brown, as delicate and as brittle as spun glass, the long filaments drawn from the drops of molten lava as they fell from the fountains and were blown away. No minerals are to be found except sulfur, and even this is not very abundant in the crater. Near the top of the west bank, which is much the highest, there are olivine crystals in the lava debris caught on the ledges, but they are imperfect and hardly worth searching for. One thing surely to remember in tramping about the floor of the crater is not to get to leeward of the burning pit, because there the sulphur fumes are sometimes almost overpowering. Indeed, it is probably this smoke, drifting with the trade wind across the south bank of the crater, which has helped to make the desert of Kau so utterly barren and desolate. One of the glories of the whole crater in the sunlight is its colour. The lava is black, yet its polished surface is iridescent, sparkling with all the colours of the prism. So an artist, to give the real impression, uses, instead of black, his most brilliant colours.
There is a probability that all the land in the vicinity of Kilauea will be made into a national park reserve, an act which Congress should surely pass, since no other area of fifty square miles within the boundaries of the United States contains so many wonders. Even if the Volcano were not active the great pit and the interesting phenomena of the surrounding country would offer as much to see as do any of the great continental national parks. Back of the Volcano House are lovely woods, with every now and then an open glade ringed by a rank growth of ferns and of vines bearing the delicious little scarlet thimble-berries which grow wild all through the region. A few miles through these woods leads one to a splendid koa forest and to the mill of the Hawaiian Mahogany Lumber Company, where the koa is sawed into boards and shipped away. The trees in this forest are very old, as can be seen by their huge knotted trunks and their twisted limbs. They would look like ancient oaks except that on the full-grown trees the leaves are chescent-shaped and polished, and on the younger shoots lace-like, as are the leaves of the mimosa. Near here are the tree-moulds formed by some ancient lava flow. The molten lava, making its way through the forest, surrounded the great trunks of the trees, burning them finally, of course, but hardening so quickly that it recorded faithfully every line of the bark before the tree was turned into ashes. Over the flow new growth has started, but here and there are holes in the ground as round, as even, as delicately chiselled as though they were casts for future columns. Here, too, are forests of tree ferns, finer than any to be seen elsewhere, except in the jungle, because they are quite untouched. With a guide it is possible to leave the beaten trail and to wander about in the cool shade of these giant ferns, treading always the thick carpet of moss; to pull from the bases of the leaves the soft "pulu," a fine-spun fibre that is often used for making mattresses. This is by far the most thoroughly tropical growth that it is possible to see in the Islands without really forsaking the normal routes, without really getting far off into unvisited valleys and nearly impenetrable forests.
A delightful day on horseback, some twenty five miles of rough riding, may be spent in a visit to the Six Craters east of Kilauea. First to be reached are The Twins, two small ancient craters, not very deep, quite filled now with vegetation, which clambers over their walls and reaches up from below toward the freer air and the sunlight. On the floors grow trees and shrubbery, so that except for the cup shape there is nothing to indicate volcanic origin. The two little craters side by side are almost identical. Next comes Puu Huluhulu, a cone crater in the top of a hill which stands boldly in the sweep of the upland plains. A clamber up its steep sides rewards one with a magnificent view of all the surrounding country. The two mountains stand out, infinitely high in the late morning, when clouds have ringed around their lower slopes, so that one is more than ever impressed, especially with the nearer dome of Mauna Loa, by far the highest mountain of its kind in the world, and certainly the most beautiful in contour. Far to the northwest is the higher peak of Mauna Kea, but in mass the mountain does not compare with its sister. And to east and south is the opalescent plain of the Pacific. From this cone crater one continues a short distance to the Two Orphans—the loneliest, most neglected of little craters. They are in thick woods quite close to each other. Nothing indicates their proximity. Ferns and trees mask the approaches to them on every side. No well defined rims, no outward slope from them, exist to indicate that they were originally cones— quite unexpectedly the ground sinks away, leaving these two queer, lost, cup-shaped depressions in the woods, startling because they are there at all, giving one an almost uncanny feeling. Even dead volcanoes do not so absolutely hide themselves. Nothing normal in nature is so almost consciously unobtrusive. One turns away as though it had been an indiscretion to invade that solitude. The woods soon become sparser, and the great plains roll onward in undulating lines beyond which one feels the sea. A low growth just obstructs the nearer view. It is, therefore, appalling when the horses stop abruptly at the edge of Kamakaopuhi, the last and by far the most wonderful of the Six Craters. It drops from the surface of the plain for 700 or 800 feet in sheer precipices. There a ledge, varying in width, gives a chance for trees to grow—trees that look like the toy trees of a child's garden, so far below are they. And then, in the centre, is another sheer drop of 1,200 or 1,300 feet, at the bottom of which only a bit of the crater floor is visible. Far, far below little clouds of white steam jet from the sides to drift upward in the still air. The silence is amazing. As one looks the crater grows deeper and deeper until it seems to be the most profound chasm in the earth's crust. To right and left are endless plains; beyond the further bank the same plains sweep onward to the sea; and yet, at one's feet, one looks down and down. Perhaps some prehistoric man reversed the idea of the Tower of Babel, and instead of trying to build to heaven set out to dig a passageway to hell—and almost succeeded, as the little jets of steam bear witness. The Hawaiian name, Kamakaopuhi, "The Eye