74. CHAPTER LXXIV.
WE got back to the schooner in good time, and then sailed
down to Kau, where we disembarked and took final leave of the
vessel. Next day we bought horses and bent our way over the
summer-clad mountain-terraces, toward the great volcano of
Kilauea (Ke-low-way-ah). We made nearly a two days' journey of
it, but that was on account of laziness. Toward sunset on the
second day, we reached an elevation of some four thousand feet
above sea level, and as we picked our careful way through billowy
wastes of lava long generations ago stricken dead and cold in the
climax of its tossing fury, we began to come upon signs of the near
presence of the volcano—signs in the nature of ragged fissures that
discharged jets of sulphurous vapor into the air, hot from the
molten ocean down in the 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.
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!
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.