75. 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 t 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.
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 in the path these were
all worn away. So he put the lantern behind him, and began to
search with his boots instead of his eyes. It was good sagacity.
The
first time his foot touched a surface that did not grind under it he
announced that the trail was found again; and after that we kept up
a sharp listening for the rasping sound and it always warned us in
time.
It was a long tramp, but an exciting one. We reached the
North Lake between ten and eleven o'clock, and sat down on a
huge overhanging lava-shelf, tired but satisfied. The spectacle
presented was worth coming double the distance to see. Under us,
and stretching away before us, was a heaving sea of molten fire of
seemingly limitless extent. The glare from it was so blinding that
it was some time before we could bear to look upon it steadily.
It was like gazing at the sun at noon-day, except that the
glare was not quite so white. At unequal distances all around the
shores of the lake were nearly white-hot chimneys or hollow
drums of lava, four or five feet high, and up through them were
bursting gorgeous sprays of lava-gouts and gem spangles, some
white, some red and some golden—a ceaseless bombardment, and
one that fascinated the eye with its unapproachable splendor. The
mere distant jets, sparkling up through an intervening gossamer
veil of vapor,
seemed miles away; and the further the curving ranks of fiery
fountains receded, the more fairy-like and beautiful they
appeared.
Now and then the surging bosom of the lake under our noses
would calm down ominously and seem to be gathering strength for
an enterprise; and then all of a sudden a red dome of lava of the
bulk of an ordinary dwelling would heave itself aloft like an
escaping balloon, then burst asunder, and out of its heart would flit
a pale-green film of vapor, and float upward and vanish in the
darkness—a released soul soaring homeward from captivity with
the damned, no doubt. The crashing plunge of the ruined dome
into the lake again would send a world of seething billows lashing
against the shores and shaking the foundations of our perch. By
and by, a loosened mass of the hanging shelf we sat on tumbled
into the lake, jarring the surroundings like an earthquake and
delivering a suggestion that may have been intended for a hint, and
may not. We did not wait to see.
We got lost again on our way back, and were more than an
hour hunting for the path. We were where we could see the
beacon lantern at the look-out house at the time, but thought it was
a star and paid no attention to it. We reached the hotel at two
o'clock in the morning pretty well fagged out.
Kilauea never overflows its vast crater, but bursts a passage for
its lava through the mountain side when relief is necessary, and
then the destruction is fearful. About 1840 it rent its overburdened
stomach and sent a broad river of fire careering down to the sea,
which swept away forests, huts, plantations and every thing else
that lay in its path. The stream was five miles
broad, in places,
and two hundred feet deep,
and the distance it traveled was forty miles. It tore up and bore
away acre-patches of land on its bosom like rafts—rocks, trees and
all intact. At night the red glare was visible a hundred miles at
sea; and at a distance of forty miles fine print could be read at
midnight. The atmosphere was poisoned with sulphurous vapors
and choked with falling ashes, pumice stones and cinders;
countless columns of smoke rose up and blended together in a
tumbled canopy that hid the heavens and glowed with a
ruddy flush reflected from the fires below; here and there jets of
lava sprung hundreds of feet into the air and burst into
rocket-sprays that returned to earth in a crimson rain; and all the
while the laboring mountain shook with Nature's great palsy and
voiced its distress in moanings and the muffled booming of
subterranean thunders.
Fishes were killed for twenty miles along the shore, where
the lava entered the sea. The earthquakes caused some loss of
human life, and a prodigious tidal wave swept inland, carrying
every thing before it and drowning a number of natives. The
devastation consummated along the route traversed by the river of
lava was complete and incalculable. Only a Pompeii and a
IIerculaneum were needed at the foot of Kilauea to make the story
of the irruption immortal.