Broad in the glare, giving light enough to
read by at a distance of three-quarters of a mile, making the moon
look as blue as an ordinary English sky, its golden gleam changed to
a vivid rose colour, lighting up the whole of the vast precipices of
that part of the crater with a rosy red, bringing out every detail
here, throwing cliffs and heights into huge black masses there,
rising, falling, never intermitting, leaping in lofty jets with
glorious shapes like wheatsheaves, coruscating, reddening, the most
glorious thing beneath the moon was the fire-fountain of
Mokuaweoweo.
By day the cooled crust of the lake had looked black and even sooty,
with a fountain of molten gold playing upwards from it; by night it
was all incandescent, with black blotches of cooled scum upon it,
which were perpetually being devoured. The centre of the lake was
at a white heat, and waves of white hot lava appeared to be
wallowing there as in a whirlpool, and from this centre the fountain
rose, solid at its base, which is estimated at 150 feet in diameter,
but thinning and frittering as it rose high into the air, and
falling from the great altitude to which it attained, in fiery
spray, which made a very distinct clatter on the fiery surface
below.
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