Chapter 56Honolulu and the Fire-Lake KilaueaHONOLULU UND DER FEUERSEE KILAULEA
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
Then I travelled on a Japanese luxury steamer, the Shino Maru1, to Honolulu.
On the “peaceful” ocean we had a frightful storm. Once again I was gravely ill with seasickness and mortal fear.
Yes, I have to pay dearly for my travel wonders!
During this storm we received the news of the sinking of the “Titanic.”2 That did not make a good impression. My cabin was nearly always dark with seas breaking over it; the giant ship rolled so much that my eating-board with all the food on it capsized against the bed, and my trunk flew to and fro from one end of the cabin to the other.
When the storm had somewhat abated, smallpox had broken out in the steerage, and we were all vaccinated.
At last we landed at Honolulu. Thank God! Three weeks I stayed here, and my memory of them is wound about with garlands of blossom.
Soft airs play about my brow — sweet fragrances breathe around me.
At first I did not like it particularly at all. It was far too licked-clean for me, too civilized, too Americanized. All those countless correct villas in the clean streets! I had a recommendation from Gustav Falke3 to his brother, who is employed as a chemist in a large factory and married to a Samoan woman (who had become a “real German housewife”). With Mrs. Lucy I now made the loveliest excursions, and came more and more to understand the delight of this climate, the tropical abundance of blossom in this country. We climbed up to the eerie Pali gorge, into which Kamehameha the Great once hurled 12,000 of his enemies. We walked out to the Deserto, the “Punchbowl,” and other radiantly beautiful viewpoints.
In the aquarium I studied the fishes, and in the museum, which is infinitely worth seeing, old Hawaiian history, and mourned for the people soaked up by civilization and dwindled away by “measles” (curiously enough) and consumption4. Above all I intoxicated myself with the abundance of blossom. In the main street sat the famous ancient flower-girls of Honolulu with their washing-baskets full of flower garlands, which are slipped over the shoulders of everyone departing and everyone arriving. Aloha — the old Hawaiian word of welcome. Aloha — hail — blossoms — beauty. But everyone told me that I must not leave without having seen the Kilauea, the fire-lake, on the island of Lavai5. That, to be sure, was an eight-day and very costly journey, to be fought for in a small boat through storms.
But I managed to obtain a journalist's steamer ticket (which has borne the company fruit a hundredfold), and set out, at the close and as the crowning of my stay, with my heart beating a little, on the voyage. This voyage, wonderful in its scenery, which went first past the garden island of Kauai, naturally turned into a martyrdom for me again. But a martyrdom with bright glimpses between, into the world of beauty round about. From Hilo, the harbour town, it went five hours by motor car up through veritable paradises. There were forests of wild apple trees blossoming purple-red, then forests of tree ferns, whole walls of intoxicatingly scented gardenias smothered in bloom. Ah, how beautiful the world is, how beautiful — and we have to die! Then came tea roses, likewise growing wild, smothered in bloom. To either side the round backs of the volcanoes Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.
At last we reached the “Volcanohouse.” A cleanly plain but very expensive lodging. Since we were not to go to the fire-lake until evening, I got my bearings only in the immediate neighbourhood, and found glorious and interesting points everywhere. One could go on voyages of discovery here for weeks. At one's feet (to be reached by goat-tracks) stretches the two-hour-long sea of lava, in which I wandered about the next morning, as far as the fire-lake, which by day, to be sure, is only a tough grey mass with here and there a little point of fire. As the sun was going down, a motor car set off again, packed with people, loaded with plaids and shawls, along a carriage road high above the sea of lava, towards a ridge. There we were unloaded. And now we had to come to terms with the Kilauea! Round about, a many-headed crowd had already gathered, lying and watching in silence.
The sun had sunk behind the opposite mountain rim, and the blue shadows crept up the rock walls.
And down below lay something, a monstrous Something in the shape of a heart, which glowed up more fierily with every minute. What in the world was that? Was that really a sea of fire? Could there be a sea of fire of such a size? And it glowed and glowed! The darker it grew round about, the more fierily it glowed up from below. And all the clouds of vapour over this sea of fire coloured more brightly with every moment.
As the little cloud of fire hangs over Vesuvius, so there hovered here over the fire-lake of Kilauea a gigantic, annihilating cloud of fire. As though it meant shortly to wrap the whole world in embers and flame!
Not a sound from all the people round about. As though spellbound, as though frozen stiff in wonder and horror, they gaze fixedly at the cosmic spectacle. Hour after hour we all stare so — as into the gullet of hell — in the deepest silence.
Towards morning a signal sounds. All rise, half unwillingly and still as though dreaming, and still in silence they climb into the motor cars.
Yes, the Kilauea of Hawaii!
Last year a wedding couple came. The husband, full of enterprise, climbed down, wanting out of curiosity to get right to the edge of the lake. The ground gave way, flames rose up — he had vanished. The wife went mad.
But how many are swallowed by the Kilauea called “Life”6: of that nobody thinks — — — And we kept our farewell, the Falkes and I, on the evening before my departure, with an old Hawaiian feast of kava-root mash and a thousand Hawaiian delicacies. And on the ship they hung me with wreaths of roses and carnations, with garlands of violets and mimosa and with the charming chains of palm seeds that I wear to this day. Aloha — all the travellers were garlanded like sacrificial bulls. Aloha! With garlands of blossom it binds my heart again and again to the flower-island in the eternal spring, to Honolulu! Of the sweet days there I could say those verses that once came to me out of the heart in the blessed Florentine time:
Roses
When of a morning, along the garden walls, I hurry to my work, my foot brushes fresh roses always. Unknown hand, does it strew them on my way, the fragrant greeting? As a pledge that flowers bloom for me too still, though knowledge has hemmed my paths? When did this heart ever unlearn its glowing, when not always dream of wonders?
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑the Shino Maru — The Shinyo Maru, and she was riding a ship younger than the journey she was on. Built at Nagasaki by Mitsubishi and completed in 1911, the Shinyo Maru was the third and last of the three big liners Toyo Kisen Kaisha put on the Hong Kong–Yokohama–Honolulu–San Francisco run: 13,426 tons, triple screws, twenty-one knots, and berths for 275 in first class, 75 in second and 800 in steerage. She had sailed for Yokohama and San Francisco for the first time on 21 August 1911, so she was eight months old when Preuschen boarded her, which is the whole meaning of "luxury steamer." Keep the eight hundred steerage berths in mind: two paragraphs from now the smallpox breaks out among them.
- ↑the news of the sinking of the “Titanic.” — The hardest date in Part Three, arriving by wireless in mid-ocean during a storm — and it settles an argument the last two chapters could not. The Titanic went down in the small hours of 15 April 1912, and within two days the news was on every wireless set afloat. So this paragraph fixes Preuschen in mid-Pacific, between Japan and Honolulu, in the second half of April 1912 — no inference, no bracketing. Work backwards from it and the eastern leg falls into place: the fortnight at Yokohama ends around the middle of April, which puts her arrival in Japan at the end of March, and the plum blossom that closes chapter 55 stops being four months out of season. What has to give instead is the "two full months" she says she spent at Angkor; from a Colombo stop at the start of February there is simply not room for them before this storm, and they are almost certainly a stay rounded up in memory fourteen years later. Note also the reaction. Fifteen hundred people have drowned on the other side of the world, her cabin is dark with green water, her trunk is flying from wall to wall — and what she writes is that it did not make a good impression.
- ↑a recommendation from Gustav Falke — A well-known German poet is opening doors for her in the middle of the Pacific — and the household on the other side of the letter is stranger than the letter. Gustav Falke (1853–1916) was a Hamburg lyric poet of real standing in the period, a friend of Detlev von Liliencron and Richard Dehmel, whose songs were set by Reger, Pfitzner and Berg. He appears nowhere else in the memoir, so this is the first sight of a connection she must have had for years. What the letter opens is a household that could stand for the whole of 1912 in three lines: a German industrial chemist working for one of the sugar or fertilizer companies of Honolulu, married to a Samoan woman whom Preuschen's German informants describe — the quotation marks are hers — as having become "a real German housewife," and it is this woman, Mrs. Lucy, who then shows her the islands. Preuschen sets the phrase down in quotation marks and adds nothing. She does not need to.
- ↑dwindled away by “measles” (curiously enough) and consumption — Her parenthesis is the whole European incomprehension of what had happened to Hawaii, set down in one word. Measles is a nursery illness in a population that has met it for a thousand years and a catastrophe in one that has not: the epidemic that crossed Hawaii in 1848 and 1849, together with whooping cough and influenza, is thought to have killed something like a tenth of the Hawaiians alive, and it came after seventy years of the same thing on a smaller scale. From perhaps several hundred thousand at Cook's arrival, the native population had fallen to under forty thousand by the time she stood in the museum. Her komischerweise — curiously enough — is not callousness but genuine bafflement that measles could do this, and it is exactly the bafflement that let the century tell itself a race was dying of its own accord rather than of what had been brought to it. The formula "soaked up by civilization" is her own, and by now a refrain: the same verdict she passed on the San, on the Herero country and on the islands of Lake Victoria, and the same word, aufgesogen, she used of inner Africa in chapter 52.
- ↑the Kilauea, the fire-lake, on the island of Lavai — The lake was real and famous, the island name is wrong — and the mistake is a printer's, since she gets it right four paragraphs later. Kīlauea is on Hawaii, the Big Island, and "Lavai" is almost certainly the print mangling Hawai, which is the form she uses when she exclaims over the volcano at the end. The fire-lake itself is Halemaʻumaʻu, the pit within Kīlauea's summit caldera, and she caught it in its great period: a standing, churning lake of molten rock, visible night after night, which had risen in 1907 and drew every visitor to the Pacific until it drained away in the collapse of 1924 and did not come back for ninety-four years. Her sailing route is confused as well — the Garden Isle of Kauai lies north-west of Honolulu and Hilo lies south-east, so the steamer for the volcano did not pass it — but the eight days and the great expense are right, and it is why she needed the ticket she gets in the next paragraph.
- ↑the Kilauea called “Life” — The turn the whole chapter has been building to, and the quotation marks are the key to it. The German runs: how many, though, are swallowed by the Kilauea "Life" — nobody thinks of that. The quotation marks make Leben a name, so that the sentence sets a second volcano beside the first and says the second takes far more. She has just told the story of one man who went over the edge and one wife driven mad, and she uses it to say that the ordinary devouring is the one nobody watches for hours in silence. It is also, at this point in the book, a personal remark. Then the dashes run out, and without so much as a paragraph break she is at a farewell dinner.