Roughing It
bowels of the mountain.
Shortly the crater came into view. I have seen Vesuvius since, but it
was a mere toy, a child’s volcano, a soup-kettle, compared to this.
Mount Vesuvius is a shapely cone thirty-six hundred feet high; its
crater an inverted cone only three hundred feet deep, and not more than
a thousand feet in diameter, if as much as that; its fires meagre,
modest, and docile.—But here was a vast, perpendicular, walled cellar,
nine hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others,
level- floored, and _ten miles in circumference_! Here was a yawning pit
upon whose floor the armies of Russia could camp, and have room to
spare.
Perched upon the edge of the crater, at the opposite end from where we
stood, was a small look-out house—say three miles away. It assisted us,
by comparison, to comprehend and appreciate the great depth of the
basin—it looked like a tiny martin-box clinging at the eaves of a
cathedral. After some little time spent in resting and looking and
ciphering, we hurried on to the hotel.
By the path it is half a mile from the Volcano House to the lookout-
house. After a hearty supper we waited until it was thoroughly dark and
then started to the crater. The first glance in that direction revealed
a scene of wild beauty. There was a heavy fog over the crater and it was
splendidly illuminated by the glare from the fires below. The
illumination was two miles wide and a mile high, perhaps; and if you
ever, on a dark night and at a distance beheld the light from thirty or
forty blocks of distant buildings all on fire at once, reflected
strongly against over-hanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what
this looked like.
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A colossal column of cloud towered to a great height in the air
immediately above the crater, and the outer swell of every one of its
vast folds was dyed with a rich crimson luster, which was subdued to a
pale rose tint in the depressions between. It glowed like a muffled
torch and stretched upward to a dizzy height toward the zenith. I
thought it just possible that its like had not been seen since the
children of Israel wandered on their long march through the desert so
many centuries ago over a path illuminated by the mysterious “pillar of
fire.” And I was sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the
majestic “pillar of fire” was like, which almost amounted to a
revelation.
Arrived at the little thatched lookout house, we rested our elbows on
the railing in front and looked abroad over the wide crater and down
over the sheer precipice at the seething fires beneath us. The view was
a startling improvement on my daylight experience. I turned to see the
effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of
men I almost ever saw. In the strong light every countenance glowed like
red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded
rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity! The place below looked like
the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up
on a furlough.
I turned my eyes upon the volcano again. The “cellar” was tolerably well
lighted up. For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on
either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated;
beyond these limits the mists hung down their gauzy curtains and cast a
deceptive gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote
corners of the crater seem countless leagues removed—made them seem like
the camp-fires of a great army far away. Here was room for the
imagination to work! You could imagine those lights the width of a
continent away—and that hidden under the intervening darkness were
hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert—and even
then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on, and on!—to the fires and
far beyond! You could not compass it—it was the idea of eternity made
tangible—and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye!
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The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black
as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it
was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of
liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad
map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight
sky. Imagine it—imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled net-
work of angry fire!
Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter, broken in
the dark crust, and in them the melted lava—the color a dazzling white
just tinged with yellow—was boiling and surging furiously; and from
these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like
the spokes of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while
and then swept round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession
of sharp worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the fiercest
jagged lightning. These streams met other streams, and they mingled with
and crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction,
like skate tracks on a popular skating ground. Sometimes streams twenty
or thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without
dividing—and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down
small, steep hills and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their
source, but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with
alternate lines of black and gold. Every now and then masses of the dark
crust broke away and floated slowly down these streams like rafts down a
river. Occasionally the molten lava flowing under the superincumbent
crust broke through—split a dazzling streak, from five hundred to a
thousand feet long, like a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre
after acre of the cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edgewise
like cakes of ice when a great river breaks up, plunged downward and
were swallowed in the crimson cauldron. Then the wide expanse of the
“thaw” maintained a ruddy glow for a while, but shortly cooled and
became black and level again. During a “thaw,” every dismembered cake
was marked by a glittering white border which was superbly shaded inward
by aurora borealis rays, which were a flaming yellow where they joined
the white border, and from thence toward their points tapered into
glowing crimson, then into a rich, pale carmine, and finally into a
faint blush that held its own a moment and then dimmed and turned black.
Some of the streams preferred to mingle together in a tangle of
fantastic circles, and then they looked something like the confusion of
ropes one sees on a ship’s deck when she has just taken in sail and
dropped anchor—provided one can imagine those ropes on fire.
Through the glasses, the little fountains scattered about looked very
beautiful. They boiled, and coughed, and spluttered, and discharged
sprays of stringy red fire—of about the consistency of mush, for
instance—from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along with a shower of
brilliant white sparks—a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood
and snow-flakes!
We had circles and serpents and streaks of lightning all twined and
wreathed and tied together, without a break throughout an area more than
a mile square (that amount of ground was covered, though it was not
strictly “square”), and it was with a feeling of placid exultation that
we reflected that many years had elapsed since any visitor had seen such
a splendid display—since any visitor had seen anything more than the now
snubbed and insignificant “North” and “South” lakes in action. We had
been reading old files of Hawaiian newspapers and the “Record Book” at
the Volcano House, and were posted.
I could see the North Lake lying out on the black floor away off in the
outer edge of our panorama, and knitted to it by a web-work of lava
streams. In its individual capacity it looked very little more
respectable than a schoolhouse on fire. True, it was about nine hundred
feet long and two or three hundred wide, but then, under the present
circumstances, it necessarily appeared rather insignificant, and besides
it was so distant from us.
I forgot to say that the noise made by the bubbling lava is not great,
heard as we heard it from our lofty perch. It makes three distinct
sounds—a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or puffing sound; and if you
stand on the brink and close your eyes it is no trick at all to imagine
that you are sweeping down a river on a large low-pressure steamer, and
that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing
from her escape-pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft her
wheels. The smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.
We left the lookout house at ten o’clock in a half cooked condition,
because of the heat from Pele’s furnaces, and wrapping up in blankets,
for the night was cold, we returned to our Hotel.
CHAPTER LXXV.
The next night was appointed for a visit to the bottom of the crater,
for we desired to traverse its floor and see the “North Lake” (of fire)
which lay two miles away, toward the further wall. After dark half a
dozen of us set out, with lanterns and native guides, and climbed down a
crazy, thousand-foot pathway in a crevice fractured in the crater wall,
and reached the bottom in safety.
The irruption of the previous evening had spent its force and the floor
looked black and cold; but when we ran out upon it we found it hot yet,
to the feet, and it was likewise riven with crevices which revealed the
underlying fires gleaming vindictively. A neighboring cauldron was
threatening to overflow, and this added to the dubiousness of the
situation. So the native guides refused to continue the venture, and
then every body deserted except a stranger named Marlette. He said he
had been in the crater a dozen times in daylight and believed he could
find his way through it at night. He thought that a run of three hundred
yards would carry us over the hottest part of the floor and leave us our
shoe-soles. His pluck gave me back-bone. We took one lantern and
instructed the guides to hang the other to the roof of the look-out
house to serve as a beacon for us in case we got lost, and then the
party started back up the precipice and Marlette and I made our run. We
skipped over the hot floor and over the red crevices with brisk dispatch
and reached the cold lava safe but with pretty warm feet. Then we took
things leisurely and comfortably, jumping tolerably wide and probably
bottomless chasms, and threading our way through picturesque lava
upheavals with considerable confidence. When we got fairly away from the
cauldrons of boiling fire, we seemed to be in a gloomy desert, and a
suffocatingly dark one, surrounded by dim walls that seemed to tower to
the sky. The only cheerful objects were the glinting stars high
overhead.
By and by Marlette shouted “Stop!” I never stopped quicker in my life. I
asked what the matter was. He said we were out of the path. He said we
must not try to go on till we found it again, for we were surrounded
with beds of rotten lava through which we could easily break and plunge
down a thousand feet. I thought eight hundred would answer for me, and
was about to say so when Marlette partly proved his statement by
accidentally crushing through and disappearing to his arm-pits.
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He got out and we hunted for the path with the lantern. He said there
was only one path and that it was but vaguely defined. We could not find
it. The lava surface was all alike in the lantern light. But he was an
ingenious man. He said it was not the lantern that had informed him that
we were out of the path, but his _feet_. He had noticed a crisp grinding
of fine lava-needles under his feet, and some instinct reminded him that