It is close to sundown, and the wide Pacific burns before me in the evening light. Through shining palm leaves and orchids flushed orange in the soft glow, I gaze down over an immeasurable expanse of ocean. Here I am only a few hundred metres above the water but, close by, the gentle slopes of Mauna Loa rise to over 4,000 metres.
I stood on that summit a few days ago, on that ‘Long Wide Mountain’ of Hawaii, after making what seemed an interminably lonely walk across a lunar landscape, climbing solidified lava flows, bare of any vegetation, in a primeval world of volcanic shapes, a frozen-to-the-spot army of petrified figures. The icy night I spent crouched in a pockmark of rock close to its top was one of the coldest bivouacs I have made anywhere. Unimaginably for Hawaii, ice crystals sprouted from narrow cracks – as I discovered to my amazement on emerging next morning from my night in the ‘honeycomb’ of the most enormous volcano in the world, dressed only in windcheater and shorts (and carrying an umbrella!). This mountain, if measured from its roots beneath the sea, would outstrip even Everest with a height of more than 10,000 metres. The brown lava streams, pitted with hundreds of cavities, over which I walked with such caution, listening to the echo of my steps (for hidden ‘bubbles’ as big as a room are not unusual here), gave way at last to the black surface of a petrified lava lake within the immense crater. I stayed over-long, forgot the time. Everything was lonely beyond words, impressive in its scale and monotony, its perpetual repetition, its silence. Later, when I groped my way back, down towards the big saddle linking Mauna Loa with Mauna Kea, in the scorching heat of a new day, the air quivering between the lava figures, I stumbled over a palette of stones: violet, green, red, bluish-green, even the glint and sparkle of silver and gold! Lost in astonishment and excitement, I picked up a nugget as large as a man’s head, only to find it weighed – next to nothing at all! Pumice … With a sigh, I let it go again – I wouldn’t be making my million that day.
I think of all those colours now, as the sun slides into the Pacific, and I stand on the slopes of the huge mountain which here at sea level boasts a diameter of a hundred kilometres, but down on the sea bed is 400 kilometres across. And no longer am I alone.
‘Maybe in a minute you will see the green lightning flash,’ whispers Elelule, a native of these islands. She lives in Oahu, is spending a few days on the main island, but her heart – she confesses – belongs to Kauai, an island of absolute green, the wettest place in all the archipelago. Many bays, it has, and luxuriant vegetation covering every inch of rock. Elelule has never been to the top of Mauna Loa: that is another world, up there! Not her world … she smiles. I can believe it: her tall figure, her flowing, unhurried gestures, the generous mouth in that sweet, dark face, everything about her cries contrast to the abstract ferocity of that eviscerated landscape with its enigmatic frozen lava figures. She knows so much about Hawaii …
So what is this green lightning? I only learnt about it a couple of minutes ago: on rare days when the sky above the ocean is cloudless as far as the eye can see, split seconds after the last blazing fragment of sun slips below the horizon, a single beam of light pierces the ocean with a brilliant green flash. Just for an instant, if it happens at all.
‘I think you are going to be lucky,’ Elelule says suddenly in a low voice. Her dark hair seems to glow in the radiant atmosphere – only the black eyes remain motionless and unchanged, looking out to sea. She has only seen the green flash once herself.
The sun! Its last rim is drowning in the waters. Will it happen? Impossible to tell if there is a small cloud far, far out there to interrupt the endless line of sight.
The great orb is gone – only the after-image glimmers before my eyes. Then, suddenly! I see it! The flash! Green as green, emerald green!
Like a laser, it penetrates the brain, enters the very soul … for a moment ... it clutches … binds you ... to everything.
I feel the breath at my side.
A secret … The sea and the sun unite.