Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/241

 way again, heading for the summit of Mauna Loa. In about a couple of days we arrived at a plain on the side  of the mountain, where is situated the volcanic crater  called Kilauea, eight thousand feet above the sea-level. We pitched our camp in full view of one of the largest volcanoes in the known world. The crater of Kilauea is seven times as large as Boston Common. Imagine yourself, kind reader, standing at its edge, looking down  into this huge pit one thousand feet deep, and beholding at its bottom lakes of liquid fire, boiling over into  each other, dashing their fiery waves against the dark  sides, and throwing up fiery jets sixty to eighty feet into  the air. The view at night is sublime in the extreme. While a dog-watch of us were seated on its edge, with our feet hanging over, another pool burst forth, with a  hissing, rushing roar. As it boiled over, the cherry-red liquid lava ran in streams to another pool. In less than an hour it formed a lake a mile in circumference, as  large as Boston Common. It kept on hissing, roaring, boiling, and sending up its fiery red liquid lava jets  sixty to eighty feet. A vast cloud of silvery brightness hung overhead, more glorious than anything we had ever  beheld. This scene was well worth a voyage around the world.

While sitting here, Bill Richmond, one of our boatswain’s mates, began to spin a yarn about the kind of a purchase he could rig in order to hoist one of the big  icebergs we had seen in the Antarctic seas so as to drop  it into this volcano. What a sizzling it would make!

Just then the commodore, with other officers, hove in sight a short distance off. He called us "a pack of