Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/246

 singing, laughing, and joking, as if on a picnic party. Place the sailor in any situation you will, you cannot deprive him of his mirth and gayety.

The commodore having selected a suitable place, we pitched our camp, satisfied the inner man the best we  could, spun several yarns, then turned in.

The next morning the sun rose clear and bright, and everything was tranquil. After an early breakfast we erected the portable houses, and the instruments were  put up and the pendulum set in motion. We then commenced to build a wall as high as we could reach,  with the lava clinkers, around the whole camp, to protect the houses from the force of the wind, the commodore and officers working with us, and as hard as the  best of us.

A number of stations had been established on the route down to the ship, so we heard from her every few  days.

The summit of this mountain is nearly fifteen thousand feet above the level of the sea. Old Tom Piner used to tell us that we were then as near to heaven as we  ever would be unless we mended our ways. My prospects of a berth in that port are much brighter to-day than they were then.

There are four craters on the summit of Mauna Loa, but they are nearly or quite inactive. We descended into one of them and traveled over it for a distance of  two miles. As we had looked into it from the brim the bottom had appeared smooth and even, but after having  descended we found it filled with heaps of clinkers and  massive blocks of lava. Little patches of beautiful