The fear shown by the
animals was pathetic; they shrank back, cowered, trembled, breathed
hard and heavily, and stumbled and plunged painfully. It was
sickening to see their terror and suffering, the struggling and
slipping into cracks, the blood and torture. The mules with their
small legs and wonderful agility were more frightened than hurt, but
the horses were splashed with blood up to their knees, and their
poor eyes looked piteous.
We were then, as we knew, close to the edge of the crater, but the
faint smoke wreath had disappeared, and there was nothing but the
westering sun hanging like a ball over the black horizon of the
desolate summit. We rode as far as a deep fissure filled with
frozen snow, with a ledge beyond, threw ourselves from our mules,
jumped the fissure, and more than 800 feet below yawned the
inaccessible blackness and horror of the crater of Mokuaweoweo, six
miles in circumference, and 11,000 feet long by 8,000 wide. The
mystery was solved, for at one end of the crater, in a deep gorge of
its own, above the level of the rest of the area, there was the
lonely fire, the reflection of which, for six weeks, has been seen
for 100 miles.
Nearly opposite us, a thing of beauty, a perfect fountain of pure
yellow fire, unlike the gory gleam of Kilauea, was regularly playing
in several united but independent jets, throwing up its glorious
incandescence, to a height, as we afterwards ascertained, of from
150 to 300 feet, and attaining at one time 600! You cannot imagine
such a beautiful sight.
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