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appraisingly at him for a few seconds, then apparently decided that the hard-backed book she’d brought with her would be more entertaining. She opened it to the book-mark, and was quickly, deeply absorbed. Gideon caught a glimpse of the title: Making Compost in Fourteen Days.
    It made him laugh. He propped a pillow against the window, leaned his head on it, and was asleep, still chuckling, before the plane left the runway.
     
    Among the few contributions that Hawaiian has made to the language of science are the words for two common types of volcanic lava: pahoehoe and a’a. On the Big Island of Hawaii, pahoehoe predominates, familiar to anyone who has ever watched a television documentary on the unending eruptions of Kilauea, the world’s most active volcano, in the south of the island. The word means “like ropes,” but it could just as well mean “like giant licorice twists”; great, black loops and coils of ropey lava cover Kilauea’s flanks and extend all the way to the sea’s edge in the southeast, not so very far below Hilo town. This pahoehoe form results when red-hot, flowing lava slows and stops gradually as it cools and becomes more viscous, so that its original, rounded, curving shapes are preserved in the newly formed rock. The effect of standing in a field of pahoehoe is grand and somber; one feels not quite secure in this vast, tarry, black world. It’s all too easy to visualize the petrified black landscape as the boiling, subterranean, liquid rock it was not so long ago, and one is always looking over one’s shoulder for the next eruption.
    But in the northwest, above Kona, the effect is more desolate than grand, more drab than somber. Here, the lava is a’a, which is lava that flowed more quickly and cooled more suddenly, cracking and splitting into great fields of dull, brown basaltic “clinkers”-spiny, jagged chunks of honeycombed volcanic rock, mostly not much bigger than a fist. The Hawaiians say with a straight face that it is called a’a because that’s the sound people make when they walk on it with bare feet. There is nothing pretty or inspiring about a field of a’a, and driving northward from Kona International Airport on the Queen Kaahumanu Highway, for the first fifteen miles at any rate, is pretty much like driving through fifteen miles of scorched rubble, its barrenness emphasized rather than relieved by the sparkling blue sea a couple of miles to the east and the fresh green slope of Mauna Kea in the west.
    “Isn’t this great?” John enthused from behind the wheel of the dusty, non-air-conditioned pickup truck he’d borrowed from the ranch. “I love this part of the island!”
    “It’s… different,” Gideon said. He knew that his friend wasn’t joking. John had been born and had grown up in Hilo, the rainiest city in the United States and one of the chillier places in Hawaii, and it had left him with an abiding love of hot, dry weather, the hotter and drier the better. Although not a complainer by nature, he frequently bemoaned the evil turn of fate that had gotten him assigned to Seattle, of all places. He was just waiting-so he said-for the Bureau to open a regional office in Yuma or Needles, before he applied for a transfer.
    Gideon pointed toward the gently sloping mountains twenty miles ahead, where the landscape gradually turned to bright, crisp green with the change in elevation. “Is that where we’re headed?” he asked hopefully.
    “Yeah, the ranch is up there, on those slopes. We’re probably looking at it right now. I know you can see the coast when you’re on it, looking down. You’ll love it, Doc. Fog every morning, lots of rain-mist, anyway-cold. You need a jacket two days out of three. Just your kind of place. Uck.”
    “Sounds great.” Gideon had been raised in sun-drenched Los Angeles. Unlike John, he had come to love the pearly, cool days of the Pacific Northwest. And Honolulu had been not only hot but miserably muggy. Cool mist sounded