This morning was wet and murky as many mornings are here, and the
view from the door was a blank up to ten o'clock, when the mist
rolled away and revealed the mystery of last night, the mighty
crater whose vast terminal wall is only a few yards from this house.
We think of a volcano as a cone. This is a different thing. The
abyss, which really is at a height of nearly 4,000 feet on the flank
of Mauna Loa, has the appearance of a great pit on a rolling plain.
But such a pit! It is nine miles in circumference, and its lowest
area, which not long ago fell about 300 feet, just as ice on a pond
falls when the water below it is withdrawn, covers six square miles.
The depth of the crater varies from 800 to 1,100 feet in different
years, according as the molten sea below is at flood or ebb. Signs
of volcanic activity are present more or less throughout its whole
depth, and for some distance round its margin, in the form of steam
cracks, jets of sulphurous vapour, blowing cones, accumulating
deposits of acicular crystals of sulphur, etc., and the pit itself
is constantly rent and shaken by earthquakes. Grand eruptions occur
at intervals with circumstances of indescribable terror and dignity,
but Kilauea does not limit its activity to these outbursts, but has
exhibited its marvellous phenomena through all known time in a lake
or lakes in the southern part of the crater three miles from this
side.
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