The volcano Gunong Tjerimai, in Java, which rises to the height of 9,000 feet, is covered with a dense vegetation up to the crater’s brink. On emerging from the thicket, the wanderer suddenly stands on the verge of an immense excavation encircled with naked rocks. He is obliged to hold himself by the branches of trees, or to stretch himself flat upon the ground, so as to be able to look down into the yawning gulf. The deep and inaccessible bottom of the crater loses itself in misty obscurity, and glimmers indistinctly through the vapours which are there slowly and incessantly ascending from its mysterious depths. All is desolate and silent, save when a solitary falcon, hovering over the vast chasm, awakes with her discordant screech the echoes of the precipice. Through a telescope may be seen, in various parts of the huge crater walls, swarms of small swallows, which have there built their nests, flying backwards and forwards. The eye can detect no other signs of life, the ear distinguish no other sound.
Humboldt describes the view down the crater of the Rucu-Pichincha—a volcano which towers above the town of Quito to a height of 15,000 feet—as the grandest he ever beheld during all his long wanderings. Guided by an Indian, he ascended the mountain in 1802, and after scaling, with great difficulty and no small danger, its steep and rocky sides, he at length looked down upon the black and dismal abyss, whence clouds of sulphurous vapour were rising as from the gates of hell.
The descent into the crater of an active volcano is at all times a difficult and hazardous enterprise, both from the steepness of its encircling rock walls, and the suffocating vapours rising from its bottom; but it is rare indeed that a traveller has either the temerity or the good fortune to penetrate as far as the very mouth of the eruptive channel, and to gain a glimpse of its mysterious horrors. When M. Houel visited Mount Etna in 1769, he ventured to scale the cone of stones and ashes which had been thrown up in the centre of the crater, where thirty years before there was only a prodigious chasm or gulf. On ascending this mound, which emitted smoke from every pore, the adventurous traveller sunk about mid-leg at every step, and was in constant terror of being swallowed up. At last, when the summit was reached, the looseness of the soil obliged him to throw himself down flat upon the ground, that so he might be in less danger of sinking, while at the same time the sulphurous exhalations arising from the funnel-shaped cavity threatened suffocation, and so irritated his lungs as to produce a very troublesome and incessant cough. In this posture the traveller viewed the wide unfathomable gulf in the middle of the crater, but could discover nothing except a cloud of smoke, which issued from a number of small apertures scattered all around. From time to time dreadful sounds issued from the bowels of the volcano, as if the roar of artillery were rebellowed throughout all the hollows of the mountain. They were no doubt occasioned by the explosions of pent-up gases striking against the sides of these immense caverns, and multiplied by their echoes in an extraordinary manner. After the first unavoidable impression of terror had been overcome, nothing could be more sublime than these awful sounds, which seemed like a warning of Etna not to pry too deeply into his secrets.
Dr. Judd, an American naturalist, who, in 1841, descended into the crater of Kilauea, on Mauna Loa, in Hawaii, well-nigh fell a victim to his curiosity. At that time, the smallest of the two lava pools which boil at the bottom of that extraordinary pit appeared almost inactive, giving out only vapours, with an occasional jet of lava at its centre. Dr. Judd, considering the quiet favourable for dipping up some of the liquid with an iron ladle, descended for the purpose to a narrow ledge bordering the pool. While he was preparing to carry out his plans, his attention was excited by a sudden sinking of its surface; the next instant it began to rise, and then followed an explosion, throwing the lava higher than his head. He had scarcely escaped from his dangerous situation, the moment after, by the aid of a native, before the lava boiled up, covered the place where he stood, and, flowing out over the northern side, extended in a stream a mile wide to a distance of more than a mile and a half!
In extinct volcanoes, the picture of desolation originally shown by their craters has not seldom been changed into one of charming loveliness. Tall forest trees cover the bottom of the Tofua crater in Upolu, one of the Samoan group; and in the same island, a circular lake of crystal purity, belted with a girdle of the richest green, has formed in the depth of the Lanuto crater.
EXTINCT CRATER OF HALEAKALA.
The lakes of Averno near Naples, and of Bolsena, Bracciano, and Ronciglione, likewise fill the hollows of extinct craters, constituting scenes of surpassing beauty, rendered still more impressive by the remembrance of the stormy past which preceded their present epoch of tranquillity and peace. Mr. Mallet describes, with glowing colours, the singular beauty of
the forest scenery around the two extinct craters of Mount Vultur in Apulia, which time has converted into two deep circular lakes.
‘I descend amongst aged trunks and overarching limbs, and pass over masses of rounded lava-blocks and cemented lapilli. All is quietude; the soft breeze of a quiet winter’s afternoon fans across the embosomed water, from the early wheat-fields and the furrowed acres of the opposite steep slopes, and brings the gentle ripple lapping amongst the roots of the old hazels at my feet.