The sensation is not unlike riding a mule or a horse, though that would be faster than my two miles per hour. The Wrangler tilts at a 30-degree angle. Still I bump down, down, down the road. The red dust of windswept Lanai covers everything - car, camera, books. It gets inside my mouth and coats my tongue and teeth.

Finally I approach a hump in the road that I am afraid will leave me suspended in midair with all four wheels off the ground. I park and walk the last half-mile to Kaunolo. There are the ruins of houses, storerooms, garden walls, and a well. The ancient village slopes down to cliffs that arch their backs against the sea. Below, the waves double their fists and pound the rocks, leaving a foamy residue of algae, fungi, bacteria - the stuff of life.

Feeling amply rewarded for my effort, I walk back to the Wrangler and turn it around. I push the lever to drop it into four-wheel drive. The engine whines. Going back is uphill and tougher. I cover two miles in just less than three hours.

Pear-shaped Lanai - least populated (3,200) of Hawaii's six main islands, low-rise and low-key, latecomer to the ways of the world - has undergone a revolutionary change. Its population of immigrants from the Philippines, Japan, Korea, and China once depended on the ripening of the pineapple, which was almost always assured by the ideal climate. But pineapple has been gone for 20 years, and today Lanaians are harvesting a new crop - tourist dollars.

Indeed, the entire island - all 140 square miles - is being marketed as a resort. Lanai may be the only place in the world where they not only rent visitors a four-wheel drive vehicle - they encourage tourists to use it by going off-road. They even provide detailed maps and directions. The rewards are rich, for the tiny island has an amazing variety of terrain - rain forests; dryland forests; raging surf; placid bays with beaches and talcum-soft sand; and cool, foggy uplands.

Munro Trail cuts through a cool forest of Norfolk pines planted in the early 1900s by George Munro, a New Zealand naturalist who was the island's version of Johnny Appleseed. The trees trap moisture from passing clouds to ease Lanai's chronic shortage of water.

Along the needled track, there are sudden breaks in the trees that reveal astonishing vistas of the blue Pacific and the islands of Maui and Molokai, about 10 miles away. These central highlands abound with game, and the bearded wild turkeys will trot alongside you - often going faster than you are. Higher up, the landscape is misty, hallucinatory; the wind picks up, and the trees lean as though the Earth's rotation had suddenly accelerated. The air is celery-crisp.

I climb to the top of the 3,370-foot mountain called Lana'ihale, the highest point on the island. At the summit, I behold an encircling panorama of all the surrounding islands - Maui, the Big Island, Molokai, Kaho'olawe, and Oahu. The wind buffets the Wrangler and seems about to blow it over.

The next day, I pack a picnic lunch and head for Shipwreck Beach on the other side of Lanai. As I park 10 feet from the surf line, the phrase flotsam and jetsam takes on new meaning. Truck-sized ship containers are piled on the beach like children's blocks, and out on the reef sits the rusting hulk of a U.S. Navy "liberty ship" that foundered there during World War II. I point the Wrangler toward the waves, munch on bread, cheese, and mangoes, and watch the tide surrender the beach, inch by inch.

To my rear are squatters' shacks built from the timbers of vessels driven ashore by lusty trade winds. To the left is the island of Oahu and the teeming urban core of Honolulu. To the right is Maui, condominiums stacked along its coast like upended ice-cube trays. Straight ahead, there is just the ceaseless sound of surf on sand.

In late afternoon, I set out for the Garden of the Gods - a kind of otherworldly landscape of wind-sculpted rocks - determined to get there before the sun sets. Again, the road is like a washboard, and the dashboard is vibrating so much it's hard to read the instruments. I make it with 15 minutes to spare at this formation of rock and color, pinnacles and canyons formed by some ancient cataclysm.

When sunset finally comes, it is bejeweled in amber, ruby, and crystal. It enters with a star presence, convinced that it is on center stage and that you have come to see it perform. It is a scene beyond nomenclature - lunar, surreal, something novelist Ursula K. Le Guin might have imagined; the Badlands with an ocean in the background, nature standing on tiptoe.

Most visitors to Lanai, including such celebrities as Kevin Costner, Willie Nelson, Tyne Daley, and Gene Hackman, spend at least one sunset at the Garden of the Gods.

The sun drops like a coin and jerks the world into dusk. I drive back with my headlights on, illuminating the two-rut, gullied road. Up ahead, the moon is impaled on a Norfolk pine along the Munro Trail, and above that is the great smear of the Milky Way.

Getting to Know Lanai

There is only one game in town for four-wheel drive rentals: Dollar Rental Lanai Jeep Safari (www.dollarlanai.com). The basic rate is $139 per day. You can cover the entire island in two full days. There are special off-season discounts and weekly rates. Because rain can make some roads impassable, June, July and August are the optimum months for safaris.

Getting there

Continental and United fly to Lanai from Philadelphia, with two stops. The lowest rcent round-trip fare was about $832.

Places to stay

There are two world-class resorts on Lanai, both operated by Four Seasons. One is a luxury beach resort, Lanai at Manele Bay (www.fourseasons.com/manelebay); the other is the Lodge at Koele (www.fourseasons.com/koele), which resembles a 19th-century English manor house amid rolling grassy hills, formal gardens, and croquet courts. Rates at both start at about $350 per night, but there are discounts for longer and off-season stays. A budget alternative is the locally owned Hotel Lanai (www.hotellanai.com), an 11-room plantation-style building that opened in 1923 to accommodate visiting pineapple buyers. The rooms are spare but newly renovated, and the rates start at $115 per night.

Places to eat

Both Four Seasons resorts boast fine dining in several restaurants. The Hotel Lanai has a Cajun-accented restaurant called Henry Clay's Rotisserie, where the menu was developed by Beverly Gannon, a world-class chef from Maui. There are a number of restaurants that cater to locals and are welcoming to visitors. Canoe's Lanai Restaurant has a sign that says, "Aloha Proudly Served Here" and has a breakfast of two eggs, toast, home fries and "a whole can of Vienna sausages" for $7.99. The Blue Ginger Café has great mahi-mahi burgers for $6.99, and Pele's Other Garden serves salads, pizza and sandwiches, including a wonderful avocado-and- feta wrap for $7.

- William Ecenbarger