Perhaps its spasmodic fires will die out,
and we shall find only blackness. Perhaps anything, except our
seeing it as it ought to be seen! The practical difficulty about a
guide increases, and Mr. Gilman cannot help us to solve it. And if
it be so cold at 4000 feet, what will it be at 14,000?
KILAUEA. June 5th.
I have no room in my thoughts for anything but volcanoes, and it
will be so for some days to come. We have been all day in the
crater, in fact, I left Mr. Green and his native there, and came up
with the guide, sore, stiff, bruised, cut, singed, grimy, with my
thick gloves shrivelled off by the touch of sulphurous acid, and my
boots nearly burned off. But what are cuts, bruises, fatigue, and
singed eyelashes, in comparison with the awful sublimities I have
witnessed to-day? The activity of Kilauea on Jan. 31 was as child's
play to its activity to-day: as a display of fireworks compared to
the conflagration of a metropolis. THEN, the sense of awe gave way
speedily to that of admiration of the dancing fire fountains of a
fiery lake; NOW, it was all terror, horror, and sublimity,
blackness, suffocating gases, scorching heat, crashings, surgings,
detonations; half seen fires, hideous, tortured, wallowing waves.
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