Word: lavas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...spreading Plumiera (frangipani), symmetrical Norfolk pine, fragrant pikake blossoms and the umbrella-shaped monkeypod trees set off lush folded ridges, twisting valleys and cascading waterfalls. Youthful (2,800,000-year-old) Hawaii has arid, cactus-sprinkled, sleepily sloping uplands, rain forests, anthurium and macadamia groves, bizarre moonscapes of rock lava topped by the snow-capped peaks of Mauna Kea (13,796 ft.) and still-active Mauna Loa (13,680 ft.). Middle-aged Maui is dominated by the rugged crater of dormant Haleakala (House of the Sun). At its rim nestles a Defense Department observatory; the pack trip to the floor...
...entombing nearly one-tenth of its 20,000 citizens and inflicting terrible damage on the city. Herculaneum, however, was more fortunate. Granted time by the wind, which blew west toward Pompeii, nearly all of Herculaneum's 5,000 inhabitants were able to flee before the wall of hot lava and mud rolled down Vesuvius' flank, so gently that it left eggshells on some lunch tables. The town vanished, almost intact, to a depth of 65 to 85 feet...
Hardening into rock, the lava became Herculaneum's unmarked tomb. The town's very location was lost until 1709, when monks in Resina, a city superimposed by chance on Herculaneum's grave, uncovered some marble theater seats while sinking a well. Other diggers plundered Herculaneum of everything their tunnels exposed. "It is one of the tragic ironies of human endeavor," writes Deiss, "that the suffocating mud did less damage to Herculaneum than the earliest excavators...
Undermined by water pouring down its slopes, the great mass had split, and a 40-ft. tide of thick goo suddenly rolled like molten lava toward a cluster of homes-and toward the red-brick Pantglas Junior and Infants School, where some 250 youngsters between seven and eleven were just sitting down to class. Across the street, Mrs. Pearl Crowe heard the rumble and looked out of her window. "I saw a black mass of moving waste pouring steadily into the school, and part of the school collapsed. I was paralyzed." Ten-year-old Dilys Pope...
Whenever a dull moment threatens, Hill rummages around in Michener's bottomless bag of epic tricks and comes up with windstorms, conflagrations, eruptions, street fights, breech births, shark attacks, luaus, lava-lavas and assorted shouts and muumuus-not to mention a large number of young wahines who appear in a state of nature and fill the giant screen with impressive outcroppings of what Hawaiians call papaia. What's more, the principals play with aplomb. Julie Andrews brings both sensuality and sensibility to a role that might easily have wallowed in sweetness and light. And Von Sydow is superb...