The sunset gold was not purer than the
living fire. The distance which we were from it, divested it of the
inevitable horrors which surround it. It was all beauty. For the
last two miles of the ascent, we had heard a distant vibrating roar:
there, at the crater's edge, it was a glorious sound, the roar of an
ocean at dispeace, mingled with the hollow murmur of surf echoing in
sea caves, booming on, rising and falling, like the thunder music of
windward Hawaii.
We sat on the ledge outside the fissure for some time, and Mr. Green
actually proposed to pitch the tent there, but I dissuaded him, on
the ground that an earthquake might send the whole thing tumbling
into the crater; nor was this a whimsical objection, for during the
night there were two such falls, and after breakfast, another quite
near us.
We had travelled for two days under a strong impression that the
fires had died out, so you can imagine the sort of stupor of
satisfaction with which we feasted on the glorious certainty. Yes,
it was glorious, that far-off fire-fountain, and the lurid cracks in
the slow-moving, black-crusted flood, which passed calmly down from
the higher level to the grand area of the crater.
This area, over two miles long, and a mile and a half wide, with
precipitous sides 800 feet deep, and a broad second shelf about 300
feet below the one we occupied, at that time appeared a dark grey,
tolerably level lake, with great black blotches, and yellow and
white stains, the whole much fissured.
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