Page:Enterprise and Adventure.djvu/38

22 as if they had been in a region of smelting furnaces. A mile or two further, they descended two or three hundred feet on to a sunken plain, rent here and there by earthquakes, and strewn with great boulders of lava, sounding hollow and unsafe under the tramp of their horses, who began to show signs of a consciousness of danger. They then obtained for the first time an idea of the great Hawaiian volcano—not like other volcanoes, the top of a mountain with broad base and furrowed sides, but a hideous fire- eaten pit, variously estimated from nine to fifteen hundred feet deep, and from nine to fifteen miles in circumference. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when they arrived near the brink of the mighty crater, at a place to windward of the smoke, where their screen was to be erected for the night. It being too late to explore the abyss that day, and the natives not having come up with food and baggage, they went to visit a sulphur bank, at a few hundred yards from the crater, out of which sulphureous vapour was issuing by various crevices, so hot in some places as instantly to scald the hand. By the time of their return to the crater's brink, some of the party of natives, and other stragglers of the party, had arrived singly, and with their bags, at the common encamping ground. The lurid fires of the caldron in the crater began to be visible, looking like masses of molten metal tossed to and fro in waves as by a wind. Night, and the drizzling vapour, having overtaken them before the natives could make anything better, they had to nestle altogether under a screen of cane and brakes thrown up against the wind, but open in front, and looking towards the caldron, being only a few feet from the precipice.