In mid-December, I took Mrs. Jaggar and a woman friend down to inspect this amazing corolla, or lily, of hard crags which had blossomed up in less than a month, so that the outer ring of boiling fluid was less than a hundred feet below us. We stood at the rift in the Kilauea floor which heads toward the southwest cliff, and suddenly we felt slight earthquakes and saw the face of that cliff crumbling in a visible tumble of rocks. The mountain was quietly breaking open athwart the Kilauea caldera floor, and while we watched we saw forty or fifty low lava fountains in a straight line burst up along a floor crack between us and the cliff.
Remember that this crack traversed the downslope between Halemaumau edge and Kilauea wall. Looking back at the ring lake, we saw it beginning to lower and leave a shoreline of black plastering spatter. When we looked into the rift crack at our feet, only one or two feet gaping open, the liquid lava showed about twenty feet down. We were standing on the side of the crack away from the motor car terminus, and floods of lava on the Kilauea floor were spreading right and left from the straight line of vents between us and Kilauea wall. We had to get away from there pronto, as no one could tell what ground might erupt between us and our car.
I carefully instructed our friend to be deliberate and step across the fissure; but the girl felt sure that crossing a red hot crack called for a leap. She stepped on a loose slab at the edge of the narrow chasm and slipped into the crack, where she was wedged until we pulled her out. We then stepped across the fissure, for the live lava was far below, and made our way back to the car without further trouble.
The lake lowered only apportionately to the slowing black outflow on the south floor, which was short-lived. This was the beginning of a splitting open of the main Kilauea Mountain flank southwest and outside the crater which continued for months.
Another adventure, and an important one, happened with the outflooding of lava in the Kau Desert, where terrace upon terrace of pahoehoe lava was building up. This finally became a hill over the rift, two miles long and 200 feet high, which we called Mauna Iki, or little Mauna Loa. The exploration, day after day, of the extending quiet lava outwelling along this rift made it necessary to find new trails from the Pahala roadway and across the desert to the lengthening hillock.
Following the new Mauna Iki trail, Mr. Finch noticed that the ancient ash beds, two or three feet thick, had surfaces as hard as Portland cement. And on one of these he, like Robinson Crusoe, found the print of a naked foot, made when the old ash was a mud. On the trail across these old surfaces many more hardened, ancient footprints were found, of men, women, children, and pigs headed both up and down the mountain.
18. Isabel and Tom Jaggar in woods on Kilauea Volcano on their return from viewing 1923 eruption in Napau Crater
19. Lava lake, fountains, and crags, March 20, 1921