"How can it blow, with a barrier like that to stop it?"

Far above towered the huge bulks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, seeming
to blot out half the starry sky. Two miles and a half above our
heads they reared their own heads, white with snow that the tropic
sun had failed to melt.

"Thirty miles away, right now, I'll wager, it is blowing forty miles
an hour."

I smiled incredulously.

Cudworth stepped to the lanai telephone. He called up, in
succession, Waimea, Kohala, and Hamakua. Snatches of his
conversation told me that the wind was blowing: "Rip-snorting and
back-jumping, eh? . . . How long? . . . Only a week? . . . Hello,
Abe, is that you? . . . Yes, yes . . . You WILL plant coffee on the
Hamakua coast . . . Hang your wind-breaks! You should see MY
trees."

"Blowing a gale," he said to me, turning from hanging up the
receiver. "I always have to joke Abe on his coffee. He has five
hundred acres, and he's done marvels in wind-breaking, but how he
keeps the roots in the ground is beyond me. Blow? It always blows
on the Hamakua side. Kohala reports a schooner under double reefs
beating up the channel between Hawaii and Maui, and making heavy
weather of it."

"It is hard to realize," I said lamely. "Doesn't a little whiff of
it ever eddy around somehow, and get down here?"