At dusk we reached the edge of the timber-line, in a drenching rain, a downpour such as is experienced only in the tropics, where the rain descends in sheets. We ate our supper and then spent the night huddled miserably together, trying in vain to keep dry.
We resumed our journey at daybreak, over the most terrible country that can be imagined. The sharp edges of the lava cut through our stout boots like broken glass, and the poor animals suffered greatly. Still, however, we persevered, and finally reached the summit just as it was getting dark. Near the centre of the mountain-top an area of about four square miles sinks to a depth of one thousand feet. This is the great crater of Makuaweoweo, which we had endured so much to see.
As I stood there in the cold, in the midst of those cheerless and God-forsaken wastes, I gazed down with speechless awe upon the untrammelled frolics of the God of Fire. The tempest-tossed lake of molten lava below the rim of the great cauldron was a typical workshop of Vulcan. The face of the lake of liquid fire alternated continually between black and white, like molten iron in a furnace. Oxidation and cooling of the fiery fluid would blacken the surface with a pall that covered it in darkest gloom; then a trembling, caused by further subterranean outbursts of steam, would break this ice-like oxide into a fretwork of tens of thousands of incandescent cracks, lighting up the smoke-charged pit with a fierce glare. Another moment, and in different parts of the lake geysers of fire of every imaginable colour would rise like fountains in a public garden.
THE AUTHOR SURVEYING THE CRATER OF MAKUAWEOWEO FROM A PINNACLE OF LAVA.
From a Photograph.
The great forbidding-looking walls of this “home of everlasting fire” sparkled with the unusual light, and then, as the spouts of flame died away, the surface would again turn black, leaving the whole mass to all appearances dead.
We found that the worst outbreak was about five thousand feet farther down the mountain-side. Some of our party were seized with such a sickness of horror at the crater’s edge that they rolled themselves up in their blankets and refused to look down upon this fiery maelstrom—and that after two days of arduous effort to reach a point of view!
When the time came for sleep, another man and I turned into a “blowhole” in the lava; it was an immense bubble that had cooled and left an opening so that we could crawl in. We little thought that there was another hole at the other end, and the piercing wind blew through this like a funnel; but we had to stay there, for it is dangerous to wander about over the rifts and chasms of jagged lava in the darkness. Here, in this strange bed-chamber, we slept, or tried to sleep—shivering and shuddering through the chilly solitude of the night in those desolate mountain wastes.
THE CRATER OF MAKUAWEOWEO, SHOWING THE AWFUL LAKE OF LIQUID FIRE.
From a Photograph.