The Collected Letters of Henry Northrup Castle by Castle Henry Northrup;Mead George Herbert;Mead Helen Castle;Castle Alfred L.;Krislov Marvin;

Author:Castle, Henry Northrup;Mead, George Herbert;Mead, Helen Castle;Castle, Alfred L.;Krislov, Marvin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

HONOLULU, Sunday, May 3, ’85.

DEAR SISTER HELEN,

Sunday has come again, and with it my thoughts revert once more to Waipio, where I believe my last letter left my companion and myself to sleep in the deep valley, until I should be in the mood to write once more. We did not pass the night at the house directly at the foot of the road, as I presume you did, but we walked further on up the valley until we reached the little village which clusters so prettily around the old church among the trees. After rounding the edge of a bluff, we came in full sight of the celebrated fall of Hiilawe, which leaps from the edge of a precipice 1700 feet sheer, truly a “sky-born” waterfall, and precipitates its soft white spray, like a falling cloud, into a pool at the head of the gorge. It was impossible to postpone our visit to this, one of the most impressive of Nature’s wonders, and after snatching a hasty meal we set out. It was only a short half mile which we had to travel, following a path through grassy and shrub-covered fields, which soon brought us to the edge of the stream as it emerged from the mouth of the cañon. Here the path disappeared altogether, and we plunged boldly in, crossing and recrossing the swift cold water, up to our knees, and above, or clambering on hands and knees over the slippery stones. Every moment the scene grew wilder, the cliffs rose higher and higher, displaying their mossy sides in occasional glimpses caught through the tops of tall trees. There was barely room to pick a path between the stream and the mountain wall, and occasionally not that as the precipice came down sheer to the water’s edge, and we were compelled to find our path in the very bed of the stream, or to cross and recross again, whenever we could. Everything from the edge of the mountain wall down to the great boulders which bordered the torrent, was covered with a profusion of tangled vegetation whose luxuriance no one who has not himself witnessed it can expect to realize. Whenever their roots could find some scanty footing in the soil, great trees reared their spreading branches 100 feet in air. The ground was covered with ferns and vines, starring the green with that most beautiful of flowers, the pendulous white bell of the kowali. The rocks were embroidered with the most exquisite covering of delicate small ferns and moss, a carpet for Queen Mab. And death was here too, rendering more pathetic the spectacle of life and its fulness. Great trees had fallen and stretched their huge trunks across the narrow gorge, seized upon almost as soon as they fell by new forms of life, ferns and mosses and sweet climbing vines, covering the bare trunks and dying limbs, concealing the death which nourished them, and making decay itself lovely. Nature had sprinkled all her gifts with

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