MADAM PELE-AT HOME
BY ELIOT KAYS STONE
MADAM PELE is the Hawaiian goddess of fire, and her home is Halemaumau—“The House (or Hall) of Everlasting Fire.” Unlike many heroines of various mythologies, the madam is no gadabout, but is almost constantly at home, and her commodious mansion—a pit sunk near the center of a much larger one, the crater of Kilauea, on the island of Hawaii—is al- ways open for the inspection of visitors.
Hawaii is the largest and youngest of the eight inhabited islands comprising the Hawaiian group, which stud the Pacific between 18 deg. 54 min. and 20 deg. 14 min. North, and between 154 deg. 48 min. and 160 deg. 13 min. West. Be- ginning with Kauai and Niihau, the most northerly of the islands, they extend in a southeasterly direction for a dis- tance of nearly four hundred miles, ter- minating with Hawaii, the most southerly of the group. They are all of volcanic origin ; but on all the islands except Ha- wali, the fires that heaved them up have turned to ashes these many ages ago. Kauai is by far the oldest of the islands. The winds and storms of centuries have obliterated very nearly all traces of its former vast craters, but, as one travels southeasterly from island to island, evi- dences of their origin become more and more marked. Oahu, Molokai, Tanai, Kahoolawe, and Maui teem with sand cones and extinct craters. On Maui, Ha- leakala, “The House of the Sun,” the largest extinct volcano in the _ world, forms one of Nature’s masterpieces. Its vast, irregular crater is over twenty miles in circumference, and, on an average, two thousand feet in depth. The rim of this great basin rises, in the highest point, to an elevation of 10,032 feet. The floor is a volcanic sand, dotted with a score or more of sand cones from three hundred to one thousand feet in height. There are two great gaps through which the an- gry gods poured their rivers of fire cen- turies ago. One has only to glance at the island of Hawaii to know its origin. Nu-
merous lava flows, black and arid wastes, and living fires, occasionally at Mauna Loa, always at Kilauea, speak a language all men can read.
Mauna Kea (White Mountain) and Mauna Loa (Lofty Mountain) are the two highest peaks of Hawaii—indeed, of the whole group. Mauna Kea is 13,825 feet high; Mauna Loa, 13,675. Mauna Kea has piled up its sand cone, a sign of per- manent extinction; Mauna Loa has not. Mauna Loa is active intermittently; Kilauea, but for few brief intervals, con- stantly.
Since 1832 Mauna Loa has had four- teen eruptions, besides numerous periods of summit activity with no overflow. While a number of these eruptions have destroyed considerable property, the loss of human life has been insignificant. Of the eruptions, only one was from the sum- mit crater, Mokuaweoweo, “The Red Crack,” and this was accompanied by an eruption in the sea off Kealakekua.* It seems to be easier for the molten rock, ow- ing to its tremendous pressure, to force a vent through the mountain’s side than to eject itself sufficiently high to over- flow the summit bowl. One at least of these outbreaks was accompanied by an overflow at Kilauea—this was the erup- tion of 1832, occurring six hundred feet below the summit—and several were ac- companied by a subsidence of Kilauea’s fires. Still, there seems to be no connec- tion between the two craters.
The eruption of 1852 stopped within only ten miles of Hilo, the largest town on the island.** In 1855-56, a stream
- It was on the shore of Kealakekua Bay that
Captain Cook, the great navigator and discov- erer of the islands, met his death in a brawl with the enraged natives in 1789. A neglected stone monument erected on the spot he fell marks the only interest his countrymen now have in the islands he discovered and charted. Kealakekua means ‘‘Pathway of the Gods.”’ It is so named on account of the lava cliffs which thrust their fronts out of the water to a height of several hundred feet. In the cliffs are num- erous caves, old burial places of the chiefs, but which are now inaccessible.
- There was also a slight flow on the north-
ern side, apparently from Mokuaweoweo.
Original from PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
