Tales of the Pacific by Jack London

Author:Jack London
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141958606
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2009-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

THE SHERIFF OF KONA

‘You cannot escape liking the climate,’ Cudworth said, in reply to my panegyric on the Kona coast. ‘I was a young fellow, just out of college, when I came here eighteen years ago. I never went back, except, of course, to visit. And I warn you, if you have some spot dear to you on earth, not to linger here too long, else you will find this dearer.’

We had finished dinner, which had been served on the big lanai, the one with a northerly exposure, though exposure is indeed a misnomer in so delectable a climate.

The candles had been put out, and a slim, white-clad Japanese slipped like a ghost through the silvery moonlight, presented us with cigars, and faded away into the darkness of the bungalow. I looked through a screen of banana and lehua trees, and down across the guava scrub to the quiet sea a thousand feet beneath. For a week, ever since I had landed from the tiny coasting-steamer, I had been stopping with Cudworth, and during that time no wind had ruffled that unvexed sea. True, there had been breezes, but they were the gentlest zephyrs that ever blew through summer isles. They were not winds; they were sighs – long, balmy sighs of a world at rest.

‘A lotus land,’ I said.

‘Where each day is like every day, and every day is a paradise of days,’ he answered. ‘Nothing ever happens. It is not too hot. It it not too cold. It is always just right. Have you noticed how the land and the sea breathe turn and turn about?’

Indeed I had noticed that delicious, rhythmic, breathing. Each morning I had watched the sea-breeze begin at the shore and slowly extend seaward as it blew the mildest, softest whiff of ozone to the land. It played over the sea, just faintly darkening its surface, with here and there and everywhere long lanes of calm, shifting, changing, drifting, according to the capricious kisses of the breeze. And each evening I had watched the sea breath die away to heavenly calm, and heard the land breath softly make its way through the coffee trees and monkey-pods.

‘It is a land of perpetual calm,’ I said. ‘Does it ever blow here? – ever really blow? You know what I mean.’

Cudworth shook his head and pointed eastward.

‘How can it blow, with a barrier like that to stop it?’

Far above towered the huge bulks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, seeming to blot out half the starry sky. Two miles and a half above our heads they reared their own heads, white with snow that the tropic sun had failed to melt.

‘Thirty miles away, right now, I’lI wager, it is blowing forty miles an hour.’

I smiled incredulously.

Cudworth stepped to the lanai telephone. He called up, in succession, Waimea, Kohala and Hamakua. Snatches of his conversation told me that the wind was blowing: ‘Rip-snorting and back-jumping, eh?… How long?… Only a week?… Hello, Abe, is that you?… Yes, yes… You will plant coffee on the Hamakua coast… Hang your wind-breaks! You should see my trees.

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