“Not me,” said Smith. “Billy Wriggs can, if he likes.”
“What?” cried the latter, “and let you get puffin’ and blowin’ about havin’ done my dags. Not me, Tommy, old man. I’m a-goin’ right up to the top, and I’ll go as far inside as he will, gen’lemen.”
“Come along, then,” cried Oliver, and the slow trudge, trudge was resumed in zig-zags, till Smith halted once more, and stood wiping his steaming face.
“Beg pardon, sir,” he said, “but if you look uppards, you can see as the smoke hangs over toward us.”
“Yes, what of that?” said Oliver.
“Well, that means wind, though we can’t feel none. Wouldn’t it be best, ’stead o’ doublin’ back, if we was to go right on now, so as to get higher and higher, and more round to windward?”
“I’m afraid that it will be the same all about the mouth of the crater,” said Panton, “but we’ll try.”
It was a simple expedient that they ought to have thought of before, and Smith proved to be correct, for as they wound on slowly upwards the heat grew greater, but they began to be aware of soft puffs of wind, and at the end of another half-hour, they had climbed to where a steady soft current of cool air blew against them. This made the final part of the toilsome ascent so bearable that as they reached a glistening vitreous stream of greyish hue which looked as if the crater had brimmed over and poured down this molten matter, Oliver leaped upon it and ran for a couple of hundred yards. Then he disappeared suddenly, and horrified the rest, who followed as fast as they could go.
But there was no cause of alarm. As they reached the top of the slope there stood their companion some twenty feet below them on the rugged, jagged and fissured slope of the crater gazing down at a dull glistening lake of molten matter, but so covered with a grey scum that it was only from time to time that a crack appeared, out of which darted a glare so bright that it was visible in the full sunshine, while a tremendous glow struck upon their faces, making their eyes smart as they gazed at the transparent quivering gas which rose up from the molten mass.
A stronger breeze was blowing here, bearing the heat away, otherwise it would have been unbearable, and they made their way on the chaos of cindery rock which lay about in blocks riven and split in every form, some glazed by the glass of the mighty natural furnace, some of a clear vesicular silvery grey, while a hundred yards or so distant and about fifty lower than where they stood, the lake of molten matter lay about circular and apparently half a mile across. The rim of the gigantic cup which from below had looked so regular was now seen to be broken into a thousand cracks and crevices, some going right down through the greyish ash and pumice nearly to the edge of the lake.