The day was perfect; for
first we had an inimitable view of the crater and all that could be
seen from the mountain-top, and then an equally inimitable view of
Cloudland. There was the gaunt, hideous, desolate abyss, with its
fiery cones, its rivers and surges of black lava and grey ash,
crossing and mingling all over the area, mixed with splotches of
colour and coils of satin rock, its walls dark and frowning,
everywhere riven and splintered, and clouds perpetually drifting in
through the great gaps, and filling up the whole crater with white
swirling masses, which in a few minutes melted away in the sunshine,
leaving it all as sharply definite as before. Before noon clouds
surrounded the whole mountain, not in the vague flocculent,
meaningless masses one usually sees, but in Arctic oceans, where
lofty icebergs, floes and pack, lay piled on each other, glistening
with the frost of a Polar winter; then alps on alps, and peaks of
well remembered ranges gleaming above glaciers, and the semblance of
forests in deep ravines loaded with new fallen snow. Snow-drifts,
avalanches, oceans held in bondage of eternal ice, and all this
massed together, shifting, breaking, glistering, filling up the
broad channel which divides Maui from Hawaii, and far away above the
lonely masses, rose, in turquoise blue, like distant islands, the
lofty Hawaiian domes of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, with snow on Mauna
Kea yet more dazzling than the clouds.
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