The tense and elastic vapors in their struggles for freedom here made one collective heave to gain the light of day, as the Island of Atlantis slowly settled down on the bed of the ocean, and the crater of eruption came up like a huge lava bubble.
During this process the cold atmosphere did effective work on the outside.
The mass was hidebound with hardening stone; but the violence of the heated gases made a grievous rent in the wrinkled coating, thus causing the mountain to shake as with the ague.
Finally, the internal pressure being too great, the massive shell was shattered into a thousand pieces. Not once, but many times, has this battle between heated gases and cold air taken place in the years since then, as the extinct craters amply testify, before the pent-up, unruly spirits of the mountain finally escaped.
Prior to reaching his destination, Yermah discovered a lava figure resembling Kerœcia, kneeling with her hands joined in prayer, and appearing to have a heavy mantle thrown over her shoulders.
This effigy is still one of the many fantastic shapes pointing the way to the Ice Cavern—that wondrous sepulcher of the Dorado.
It was not then an ice-cold spring banked with snow, in the midst of desolation, but was a vent where three conical mouths of the volcano flared open from different quarters, and hardened there in a dome-shaped elevation.
Lying to the south is a particularly large mass of scoria turned upside down, which has been used from time immemorial by the Guanches as a place to pack and make up their parcels of cavern snow before venturing to carry it under a vertical sun, thirty miles to the capital below.
It was nightfall when Yermah reached this spot, where he found the pentagram mentioned in Akaza’s will.
Nature had made it for him of whitish felspar on the western side of the scoria table. Certain that he had been guided aright, he sat down to await the appearance of Venus in the eastern horizon.