“Hold, chief!” cried Olmedo, excited by his sacrilegious act, “the mercy you refuse you may shortly need. This image is no God, but it represents the Son of God; his words of peace and love will fill my heart and rejoice my spirit, when your false Pele, with all her thunderings, is dumb in my ears. God made the volcano, and at his bidding it sleeps or overflows. Cease to bow the knee to Pele, and pray to Him, and you shall learn such truths as shall make you live on earth in peace, and welcome death with joy.”
“Ha! white priest, do you despise Pele?” replied Pohaku fiercely, and seizing Olmedo by the arm, he dragged him outside the house to the verge of the precipice, which looked down upon the crater of Kilauea.
That immense circle of dead lava, now known as the black ledge, which contracts the active portion of the crater to a circuit of a few miles, was not then in existence. The whole pit, embracing an area sufficient to contain the city of New York, was in commotion. From where Olmedo looked, the height above the fiery mass was about five hundred feet. It had undermined the wall of the crater, so that it overhung the sea of lava, as the Table Rock does the cataract of Niagara. Immediately beneath him, therefore, lay the lurid cauldron. Its heavy, sluggish waves, of deep crimson, surged against the banks with a muffled roar, as unlike the glad sound of surf, as a groan to laughter. Occasionally a thick black crust formed over the surface, like a huge scab. Then this would break asunder, and bright red currents of liquid rock appear underneath; whirlpools of boiling blood fusing everything they touched into their own gore-hued flood. Huge masses of solid stone were vomited high into the air, and fell hissing and sputtering back again into the depths of the fiery gulf, to be again cast forth, or melt like wax in a ten-fold heated furnace. Lighter jets of lava were being thrown up, sometimes in rapid succession, and sometimes at long intervals, which filled the atmosphere with red hot spray and steam, and gases, blown hither and thither, and whirled about like the sands of the desert before a simoom, by the furious blasts of wind that swept with mingled moans and shrieks across that lake of hell, and through its glowing caverns and out of its black pits. Overhead hung a dense cloud, gradually spreading as it rose, until it enveloped all the region of the crater. The smoke of its torment, like a pall, covered the cancerous earth, to screen its throes from the light of the sun.
Coming so unexpectedly upon a spectacle of which he had heard only vague accounts, Olmedo, at first sight, forgot both himself and his enemies in awe. It was indeed a fearful spectacle, beautiful even in its terror, exciting all that was appalling in the imagination, and fascinating the eye as by a spell. The solid earth was passing away in a flame, and would soon be as a vapor. Olmedo felt as if he were the sole spectator. The wreck of matter lay before the last man. Such was his immediate sensation, from which he was rudely roused by Pohaku’s hoarse voice crying, “How like you this lake to swim in? You shall bathe in it before to-morrow’s sun sinks behind yonder forest. My people shall see if your god will carry you unharmed over Pele’s billows of fire. Meantime, feast and be merry, for the goddess likes a full stomach,” and thrusting him back into the house he left him.
Tolta lingered behind. Approaching Olmedo, he whispered in Spanish, “Would you save yourself from this death?”
“My life is the gift of my God,” he replied. “His will and not that cruel chief’s will determine my fate.”
“Have you forgotten Beatriz so soon? How would she feel to see your form shrivelling and writhing as it plunged into that boiling lava? Think of her, priest.”
“Wretch, you dare not tell her this, much less make her witness such a horror!”
“I dare not! Know that Tolta dares anything for his revenge, and to glut his desires. With you it lays to save yourself and her from this fate. Pohaku has summoned his people to a solemn festival, before he strikes at Kiana. He is furious that the three Spaniards should have escaped their intended sacrifice. Think you he will spare Beatriz when he sees her? She either dies on the altar or by his lust.”