Upwards still, in the cold bright air, coating the edges of deep
cracks, climbing endless terraces, the mules panting heavily, our
breath coming as if from excoriated lungs,--so we surmounted the
highest ledge. But on reaching the apparent summit we were to all
appearance as far from the faint smoke as ever, for this magnificent
dome, whose base is sixty miles in diameter, is crowned by a ghastly
volcanic table-land, creviced, riven, and ashy, twenty-four miles in
circumference. A table-land, indeed, of dark grey lava, blotched by
outbursts, and torn by streams of brown a-a, full of hideous
crevasses and fearful shapes, as if a hundred waves of lava had
rolled themselves one on another, and had congealed in confused
heaps, and been tortured in all directions by the mighty power which
had upheaved the whole.
Our guide took us a little wrong once, but soon recovered himself
with much sagacity. "Wrong" on Mauna Loa means being arrested by an
impassable a-a stream, and our last predecessors had nearly been
stopped by getting into one in which they suffered severely.
These a-a streams are very deep, and when in a state of fusion move
along in a mass 20 feet high sometimes, with very solid walls.
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