"The hot air over the flow rises in a strong current. At the height of perhaps 3,00o feet from the surface it rarifies and chills, condensing the aqueous vapor with which all air is loaded, thus forming a dark, massive cloud directly over the flow and marking its course. Some seven miles inland this line of cloud made a sharp turn or elbow to the northward, di rectly toward the summit crater of Mokuaweoweo. We had the pillar of cloud by day, but to our chagrin, we had not pillar of fire by night. Noting the length of this cloud, and where it ap peared to terminate, I estimated the length of the flow at from sixteen to twenty miles, and the head of it very much more than twice as far inland as Kahuku Ranch.
"The front of the new lava was easily distinguished as we steamed up to it by its black and rugged piles and outjetting points, in contrast with the whitish, mossy sea line and older rocks on each side. From most parts of its shore small clouds of steam were rising thickly. From a cone near its south side a large jet of strong steam rolled continuously and clouds of this swept up on land. Hereabouts for fifty feet out from shore the water was covered with visible steam. We stopped near the south side, dropped our boats and rapidly landed the whole crowd of two hundred visitors, including natives. We climbed up the rocks some twenty feet upon an old pahoehoe flow. This was a mass of hummocks, wrinkles and bubble caves, but quite easily clambered over. Many large sea-worn boulders and much sand had been flung up one hundred feet or more in land over this by the tidal wave of 1868. A lauhala grove was on one spot of sand, and the green streamers of the maia pilo lay in profusion on the lava with their great, lovely plumed white flowers.
"But to the left the vast, hideous mounds of Pele's awful work enchained our eyes. like enormous piles of brownish coal, but indescribably more ragged, stretched inland over the low rising plain for two miles to the mountain slope. in a sub stantially direct line, this bank of hot cinders, averaging twenty eight feet high on the edge, hut rising towards the middle to an average height of forty feet. Many points must have been twenty feet or more above the general level, if the word level can be used of such chaotic masses of ruin. The sides of the mass were steep and crumbling, composed of large, ragged clinkers and fine cinders intermingled, difficult enough to climb on its jagged but yielding footing. The whole seemed like a colossal embankment, as if Io,000 cyclopean trains of mastodon cars had been dumping the rocks of Mauna Loa for a century towards the sea.
"All was shimmering with heat. We found a way up the crumbling heaps of pumice and slag, and reckless of singeing hoots and hot blasts from below, scrambled around among the sharp and ragged pinnacles to higher points, whence only a wider waste and wilder desolation were to be seen. At one point a party were charring their sticks in a red-hot hole. At another was a rent fifty feet long, where, some fifteen feet below, was a great glow of almost white heat along its length. There was almost an entire absence of noxious odors and gases, and even of steam, though sudden hot blasts of air would often drive one aside.
"The sea front was most impressive. Here the great em bankment rolled over the cliff some twenty feet, making slopes of from fifty to seventy feet high from the water along a shore of from three-fourths to a whole mile in length. I consider it cer tainly not less than the former distance. The sea front is broken into a succession of long, ragged capes and deep coves, with many wide beaches of coarse, black gravel, thrown up by the waves, looking like shiny nut coal. Here and there huge round boulders, bristling with adhering cinders, lay half buried in the ragged slopes. One of these was visited and found to be twenty feet long. Are they fragments of the mountain's massive throat torn by the outrushing flood, which half melts and rounds them The water near the shore was generally from one hundred to two hundred degrees Fahrenheit and in spots much higher and steaming.
"The northwest side of the floor presents a straight solid em bankment, apparently thirty or forty feet high, at an angle of 40° to the coast line, stretching northward for apparently a mile or more, then turning inland. Evidently the breadth of the stream is fully one and a half miles at a short distance inland. I judge that on the lava slope are deposited three square miles of clinkers, thirty or forty feet in depth. The flow evidently over reaches the original coast line from two hundred to five hundred feet, making some thirty acres of new land. Much of this last is of great depth, soundings being from twenty to thirty fathoms close to the shore. A large or rapid extension of coast is im possible where such a depth is to be filled in.
"It is comparatively easy to estimate the amount of forces in volved, and the colossal dimensions of the great tidal wall of mingled white-hot lava and scoria foam that rolled so steadily and massively forward to the sea, which it first reached more than two weeks before. One can perhaps partially imagine how that tide of fire and rocks of near a mile wide rolled for a week over the shore into the deep and convulsed ocean. But I have never seen work of that sort, and I have no powers of imagina tion to conceive the awful splendor of the downward charge of that mile-broad deluge of fire, nor the horror of tornado clash and roar with which that vast wall of rolling rock and cinder pressed forward over the land, piling upon the plain, crashing into the sea. We saw but the dead and dying remains—dreadful, dark and silent.
"The lava in its descent appeared to be making as exclusively. Pahoehoe was seen, however, mingled in some portions of the flow visited. The lava was bright on Sunday night, the 3oth, as seen from the Kahuku Ranch near by and much glow was visible on Monday morning. * * * I can add no more of special interest about the eruption of 1887, except it is unquestion ably much greater in quantity than that of 1868, being more than twice the length of the latter, and of greater depth on the ground." Plate 19 represents a part of the flow of 1887.
Dec. 29, 1887, J. S. Emerson from Kohala sees volumes of smoke and steam pouring out of the summit crater, but no glow or reflection of fire. These signs of activity disappeared early in February following.