The recent lava flow by which Halemaumau has considerably heightened
its walls, has raised the hill by which you ascend to the brink of
the pit to a height of fully five hundred feet from the basin, and
this elevation is at present much more fiery and precarious than the
former one. It is dead, but not cold, lets one through into cracks
hot with corrosive acid, rings hollow everywhere, and its steep
acclivities lie in waves, streams, coils, twists, and tortuosities
of all kinds, the surface glazed and smoothish, and with a metallic
lustre.
Somehow, I expected to find Kilauea as I had left it in January,
though the volumes of dense white smoke which are now rolling up
from it might have indicated a change; but after the toilsome,
breathless climbing of the awful lava hill, with the crust becoming
more brittle, and the footing hotter at each step, instead of
laughing fire fountains tossing themselves in gory splendour above
the rim, there was a hot, sulphurous, mephitic chaos, covering, who
knows what, of horror?
So far as we could judge, the level of the lake had sunk to about 80
feet below the margin, and the lately formed precipice was
overhanging it considerably. About seven feet back from the edge of
the ledge, there was a fissure about eighteen inches wide, emitting
heavy fumes of sulphurous acid gas.
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