Descending the mountain we find ourselves on the brink of a precipice, overhanging a turbulent stream about two hundred feet below, and facing the ravine or cañon, which contains these wonders, and which is smoking incessantly throughout its entire length.
Just at this commanding point a hotel has been erected, from the portico of which in the early morning we can watch the grand columns of vapor opposite, before they are shorn of a portion of their splendor by the rising sun.
It is possible to walk the entire length of the ravine, surrounded by jets of steam, and little bubbling springs of mineral water; some hissing, some sputtering, others roaring, and others shrieking; the ground being soft and hot, your stick sinking into the clayey ooze, and a puff of spiteful steam following it as withdrawn; your shoes white or yellow, as you tread the chalk or the sulphur banks, and your feet burning with the hot breath of the sulphur blasts below.
If you are not stifled by the sulphur fumes above, be thankful; and when at last you reach the 'Mountain of Fire' at the head of the ravine, and look back upon the perils of your upward journey, you think of poor Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Bunyan in his dreams never imagined a more horrible place.
It is a vale of wonders—Nature's laboratory, where chemistry is to be studied. The name and number of the springs is 'legion,' Hot Sulphur, Warm Sulphur, Blue Sulphur, White Sulphur, Alum, Salt, and nobody knows all the mineral compounds. You may stand with one foot in a cold bath and another in a hot one—if you can. With one hand you may dip up alum water, as bitter and pure as chemistry can compound it, and with the other sulphur water, that shall sicken your very soul. If you have rheumatism, bathe in the splendid sulphur baths or the Indian Spring; if your eyes are weak, use the eye-water, which beats any ever charmed by magical incantations.
In the midst of this ravine, into which so many springs are emptying themselves, is a little stream, which, starting from the head of the cañon quite cool and pure, receives all their mingled waters, and gradually increases in heat and abominable taste, until at last it defies description.
Its stones and the rocks that line its banks, owing probably to the protection of the cooler water, are tolerably firm in texture, all other parts of the ravine being burned to a powder which crumbles in the hand, or, when mixed with water, forms an ooze or clay. Many of these stones by the sides of this little stream are banded with colors like the Pictured Rocks of Lake Superior (to compare great things with small), and probably from the same cause. These beautiful cliffs, the Schwee-archibi-kung of the Indians, are colored by percolations of surface-water, by which the coloring matter of various minerals and acids is brought to the face of the precipice, and it is reasonable to suppose that the drainage of the mountains behind the Devil's Cañon, sinking to similar beds of minerals, is thrown out by the volcano below in the shape of steam or mineral springs. It is impossible to drill a hole two feet deep in the side of the ravine without provoking a little jet of steam. Now, Daubeny, who is the highest authority on volcanoes, states that the greater part of their ascending vapor is mere steam, and that in 'Pantellaria (a volcanic island near Sicily) steam issues from many parts of this insular mountain, and hot springs gush forth from it which form together a lake six thousand feet in circumference.'
Similar jets of steam and hot water are observed at St. Lucia, near the crater Oalibou, where also there is a continual formation of sulphur from the condensation of the vapors, a phenomenon which is lavishly displayed in the Devil's Cañon, and in fact around most known volcanoes. The writer observed it fully two miles from the active volcano of Kilawea, forming a fine sulphur bed, and a body of steam so dense that rheumatic natives of Hawaii were in the habit of using it as a vapor bath.
The jets of steam in the cañon are of the most curious variety. One, honored by the name of the 'Devil's Steamboat,' is quite a formidable affair, high up on the hillside, and puffing uninterruptedly, and so powerfully that the steam is invisible for at least five feet from the vent. The ground about it is too soft to permit approach, and the heat too great to tempt it. On a frosty morning, just before sunrise, it is a fine sight. This, however, is only one of hundreds. It would be imagined that if they all came from the same source, they would puff in some sort of unison—that the beatings of the mighty heart below would be felt simultaneously in every pulse; but the fact is quite the reverse. No tune or concord is preserved by any two in the cañon; one moves with the quiet regularity of respiration, while the next is puffing with the nervous anxiety of a little high-pressure tug boat. It affords endless amusement to listen to their endless variety of complaint; some are restless, some spiteful, and some angry, while others sound as merrily as a teakettle, or beat a jolly 'rub-a-dub,' 'rataplan,' that makes a man's soul merry to hear. In fact, there is a little retreat just out of the cañon, styled the Devil's Kitchen, where the pot and the saucepan, the gridiron and the teakettle are visible to men gifted with imaginations strong enough to grasp the unseen.
The great feature of the cañon, which has given it the unmerited name of 'Geyser,' is the Witches' Caldron, a small cavity in the hillside, seemingly running back into the hill at an angle of forty-five degrees, filled with villanous black mud in unceasing commotion.