Here and there in the decaying volcanic ash and disintegrating lava can sometimes be found beautiful, small, star-rayed zeolite, or the pale green olivine, or coarse black augite crystals. These are of no value, save as they show some of the forms taken by cooling lava, and are of interest chiefly to the scientist.
On the island Hawaii are three great mountains from 8,200 to 13,600 feet above the ocean, which smashes its mighty tides and surf waves against the coast below. One of these, Mauna Kea (White Mountain), is an extinct volcano with a lake of water in its crater. Hualalai is dormant, although from it there was a great eruption a little over a hundred years ago, and [[173]]even now possibilities of activity are talked about by those who cultivate sugar-cane and coffee on its lower slopes. Mauna Loa (Great or long mountain) has a most interesting active crater on its summit, Mokuaweoweo (Blood-red island), from which enormous rivers of lava are hurled down to the waiting ocean many miles below.
What is said to be the most active crater in the world, Kilauea, lies on an eastern spur of Mauna Loa at an elevation of 4,000 feet above the sea. This crater is a great caldron or pit crater, and has been known among the Hawaiians for centuries as Ka-Lua Pele (The Pit of Pele). Below Kilauea are a number of craters of similar character, great sunken holes or pits in a country of almost even surface.
Kilauea is a surprise to the tourist. Ki-lau-ea means “the rising up or living leaf of the ti-plant.” Ea means “to rise up” and also “to live.” Ki-lau means “ti-leaf.” A gradual ascent by rail and motor-car for about thirty miles brings the visitor to a flat region miles in extent and sparsely covered with giant ferns[1] and shrubs and gray-leaved trees with fringed red balls of flowers. Here and there small clouds of steam come from crevices around a hotel where the traveller finds his resting-place.
In front of this hotel, and not seen until the [[174]]motor-car stops, is the crater whose edges are almost level with the surrounding plain. It is a precipice-walled bowl, three miles across, with a multitude of steam jets breaking through its vast floor and a great cloud of smoke rising from a pit in a black border-land of frozen lava. Kilauea looks like a congealed lake whose glossy black hard waves had hardened while rolling and struggling with each other under some fierce tempest. It is, however, a cone ascending gradually to the fire-pit from these precipitous edges of the bowl.
Under the smoke cloud of the pit lies the always active lake of fire, Ka-Lua Pele (The Pit of Pele), the traditional home of the goddess Pele, now called Halemaumau (House fixed or continuing).
From this volcano Kilauea, and the crater Mokuaweoweo, which lies like an island in the top of Mauna Loa, nearly 10,000 feet higher, come enormous and sometimes destructive lava flows. They are called rivers of lava, but a lava river, unlike a stream of water, flows underneath a continually cooling and hardening crumpled surface, pushing its way from under and at last leaving long tunnels. Sometimes new lava melts through the walls of these caves and pours along the path left ages before, frequently finding an outlet even under the waves of the sea. The [[175]]natives say, “Pele has gone to the sea by the ala huna [the hidden path].”
There are two kinds of lava which these rivers carry down. One in cooling becomes very smooth and hard. Its surface shines like black satin. Professor C. H. Hitchcock, the eminent geologist, says: “The name pa-hoe-hoe signifies having the aspect of satin or having a shining smooth surface. It is quite hummocky and shows a wrinkled ropy structure.” The glossy part is real volcanic glass shining on the surface because the silica which is used in making glass rises to the top of the cooling lava. It is lighter than the other ingredients. This pa-hoe-hoe lava is abundant in the lava fields around Mexico City.
The name a-a, which signifies “torn up by roots,” is the name given to another kind of lava. An a-a flow is lava changed into bristling, ragged rocks, with innumerable fine sharp edges cutting like fragments of broken glass. It appears very much like slag from iron furnaces, only infinitely worse to handle.
These two Hawaiian names are now the accepted scientific names for these classes of lava the world over.