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74 - Roughing It by Mark Twain · Roughing It

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  Speaker 1: This is chapter seventy four of Roughing It. This is
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  Speaker 1: a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: Ruffing It by Mark Twain, Chapter seventy four. We got
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  Speaker 1: back to the schooner in good time, and then sailed
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  Speaker 1: down to Cow, where we disembarked and took final leave
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  Speaker 1: of the vessel. Next day we bought horses and bent
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  Speaker 1: our way over the summer clad mountain terraces toward the
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  Speaker 1: great volcano of kilawea Qui l'aowei Ah. We made nearly
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  Speaker 1: a two days journey of it, but that was on
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  Speaker 1: account of laziness. Towards sunset on the second day, we
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  Speaker 1: reached an elevation of some four thousand feet above sea level,
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  Speaker 1: and as we picked our careful way through billowy wastes
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  Speaker 1: of lava long generations ago, stricken dead and cold in
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  Speaker 1: the climax of its tossing fury, we began to come
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  Speaker 1: upon signs of the near presence of the volcano, Signs
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  Speaker 1: in the nature of ragged fissures that discharged jets of
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  Speaker 1: sulfurous vapor into the air hot from the molten ocean
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  Speaker 1: down in the bowels of the mountain. Shortly the crater
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  Speaker 1: came into view. I have seen Vesuvius since, but it
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  Speaker 1: was a mere toy, a child's volcano, a soup kettle.
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  Speaker 1: Compared to this, mount Vesuvius is a shapely cone thirty
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  Speaker 1: six hundred feet high. Its crater, an inverted cone, only
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  Speaker 1: three hundred feet deep, and not more than a thousand
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  Speaker 1: feet in diameter, if as much as that. Its fires meager, modest,
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  Speaker 1: and docile. But here was a vast, perpendicular walled cellar,
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  Speaker 1: nine hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others,
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  Speaker 1: level floored, and ten miles in circumference. Here was a
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  Speaker 1: yawning pit upon whose floor the armies of Russia could
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  Speaker 1: camp and have room to spare. Perched upon the edge
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  Speaker 1: of the crater at the opposite end from where we
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  Speaker 1: stood was a small lookout house, say three miles away.
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  Speaker 1: It assisted us by comparison to comprehend and appreciate the
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  Speaker 1: great depth of the basin. It looked like a tiny
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  Speaker 1: Martin box clinging at the eaves of a cathedral. After
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  Speaker 1: some time spent in resting and looking and ciphering. We
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  Speaker 1: hurried on to the hotel by the path. It is
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  Speaker 1: half a mile from the volcano house to the lookout house.
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  Speaker 1: After a hearty supper, we waited until it was thoroughly dark,
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  Speaker 1: and then started to the crater. The first glance in
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  Speaker 1: that direction revealed a scene of wild beauty. There was
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  Speaker 1: a heavy fog over the crater, and it was splendidly
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  Speaker 1: illuminated by the glare from the fires below. The illumination
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  Speaker 1: was two miles wide and a mile high perhaps. And
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  Speaker 1: if you ever, on a dark night and at a
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  Speaker 1: distance beheld the light from thirty or forty blocks of
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  Speaker 1: distant buildings, all on fire at once, reflected strongly against
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  Speaker 1: overhanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what
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  Speaker 1: this looked like. A colossal column of cloud towered to
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  Speaker 1: a great height in the air immediately above the crater,
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  Speaker 1: and the outer swell of every one of its vast
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  Speaker 1: folds was dyed with a rich crimson luster, which was
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  Speaker 1: subdued to a pale rose tint in the depression between.
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  Speaker 1: It glowed like a muffled torch, and stretched upward to
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  Speaker 1: a dizzy height toward the zenith. I thought it just
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  Speaker 1: possible that its like had not been seen since the
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  Speaker 1: children of Israel wandered on their long march through the
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  Speaker 1: desert so many centuries ago, over a path illuminated by
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  Speaker 1: the mysterious pillar of fire. And I was sure that
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  Speaker 1: I now had a vivid conception of what the majestic
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  Speaker 1: pillar of fire was like, which almost amounted to a revelation.
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  Speaker 1: Arrived at the little thatched lookout house, we rested our
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  Speaker 1: elbows on the railing in front and looked a broad
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  Speaker 1: over the wide crater and down over the sheer precipice
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  Speaker 1: at the seething fires beneath us. The view was a
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  Speaker 1: startling improvement on my daylight experience. I turned to see
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  Speaker 1: the effect on the balance of the company and found
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  Speaker 1: the reddest faced set of men I almost ever saw
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  Speaker 1: in the strong light. Every countenance glowed like red hot iron.
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  Speaker 1: Every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded rearward into dingy,
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  Speaker 1: shapeless obscurity. The place below looked like the infernal regions,
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  Speaker 1: and these men, like half cooled devils, just come up
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  Speaker 1: on a furlough. I turned my eyes upon the volcano again.
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  Speaker 1: The cellar was tolerably well lighted, up For a mile
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  Speaker 1: and a half in front of us, and half a
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  Speaker 1: mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was
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  Speaker 1: magnificently illuminated. Beyond these limits, the mists hung down their
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  Speaker 1: gauzy curtains and cast a deceptive gloom over all. That
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  Speaker 1: made the twinkling fires in the remote corners of the
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  Speaker 1: the crater seemed countless leagues removed, made them seem like the
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  Speaker 1: camp fires of a great army far away. Here was
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  Speaker 1: room for the imagination to work. You could imagine those
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  Speaker 1: lights the width of a continent away, and that hidden
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  Speaker 1: under the intervening darkness were hills and winding rivers and
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  Speaker 1: weary wastes of plain and desert. And even then the
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  Speaker 1: tremendous vista stretched on and on and on to the
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  Speaker 1: fires and far beyond. You could not compass it. It
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  Speaker 1: was the idea of eternity made tangible, and the longest
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  Speaker 1: end of it made visible to the naked eye. The
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  Speaker 1: greater part of the vast floor of the desert under
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  Speaker 1: us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level,
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  Speaker 1: but over a mile square of it was ringed and
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  Speaker 1: streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid
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  Speaker 1: and gorgeously brilliant fire. It looked like a colossal railroad
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  Speaker 1: map of the state of Massachusetts done in a chain
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  Speaker 1: lightning on a midnight sky, imagine it. Imagine a cold
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  Speaker 1: black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire.
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  Speaker 1: Here and there were gleaming holes one hundred feet in
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  Speaker 1: diameter broken in the dark crust, and in them the
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  Speaker 1: melted lava, the color of a dazzling white just tinged
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  Speaker 1: with yellow, was boiling and surging furiously. And from these
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  Speaker 1: holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like the
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  Speaker 1: spokes of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course
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  Speaker 1: for a while, and then swept round in huge rainbow curves,
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  Speaker 1: or made a long succession of sharp worm fence angles,
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  Speaker 1: which looked precisely like the fiercest jagged lightning. These streams
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  Speaker 1: met other streams, and they mingled with and crossed and
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  Speaker 1: recrossed each other in every conceivable direction, like skate tracks
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  Speaker 1: on a popular skating ground. Sometimes streams twenty or thirty
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  Speaker 1: feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing,
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  Speaker 1: and through the opera glasses we could see that they
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  Speaker 1: ran down small steep hills and were genuine cataracts of fire,
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  Speaker 1: white at their source, but soon cooling and turning to
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  Speaker 1: the richest red grained with alternate lines of black and gold.
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  Speaker 1: Every now and then masses of the dark crust broke
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  Speaker 1: away and floated slowly down these streams, like rafts down
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  Speaker 1: a river. Occasionally the molten lava flowing under the superincumbent
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  Speaker 1: crust broke through, split a dazzling streak from five hundred
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  Speaker 1: to a thousand feet long, like a sudden flash of lightning,
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  Speaker 1: and then acre after acre of the cold lava parted
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  Speaker 1: into fragments, turned up edgewise, like cakes of ice when
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  Speaker 1: a great river breaks up, plunged downward and were swallowed
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  Speaker 1: in the crimson cauldron. Then the wide expanse of the
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  Speaker 1: thaw maintained a ruddy glow for a while, but shortly
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  Speaker 1: cooled and became black and level again. During a thaw,
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  Speaker 1: every dismembered cake was marked by a glittering white border,
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  Speaker 1: which was superbly shaded inward by Aurora borealis rays, which
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  Speaker 1: were a flaming yellow where they joined the white border,
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  Speaker 1: and from thence toward their points tapered into glowing crimson,
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  Speaker 1: then into a rich, pale carmine, and finally into a
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  Speaker 1: faint blush that held its own a moment and then
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  Speaker 1: dimmed and turned black. Some of the streams preferred to
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  Speaker 1: mingle together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then
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  Speaker 1: they looked something like the confusion of ropes one sees
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  Speaker 1: on a ship's deck when she has just taken in
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  Speaker 1: sail and dropped anchor, provided one can imagine those ropes
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  Speaker 1: on fire through the glasses. The little fountains scattered about
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  Speaker 1: looked very beautiful. They boiled and coughed and spluttered and
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  Speaker 1: discharged sprays of stringy red fire of about the consistency
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  Speaker 1: of mush, for instance, from ten to fifteen feet into
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  Speaker 1: the air, along with a shower of brilliant white sparks,
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  Speaker 1: a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood and
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  Speaker 1: snow flakes. We had circles and serpents and streaks of lightning,
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  Speaker 1: all twined and wreathed and tied together without a break
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  Speaker 1: throughout an area more than a mile square. That amount
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  Speaker 1: of ground was covered, though it was not strictly square,
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  Speaker 1: and it was with a feeling of placid exultation that
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  Speaker 1: we reflected that many years had elapsed since any visitor
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  Speaker 1: had seen such a splendid display, since any visitor had
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  Speaker 1: seen anything more than the now snubbed and insignificant North
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  Speaker 1: and South Lakes in action. We had been reading old
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  Speaker 1: files of Hawaiian newspapers and the record book at the
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  Speaker 1: Volcano House, and were posted. I could see the North
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  Speaker 1: Lake lying out on the black floor, away off in
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  Speaker 1: the outer edge of our panorama, and knitted to it
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  Speaker 1: by a web work of lava streams. In its individual capacity,
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  Speaker 1: it looked very little more respectable than a school house
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  Speaker 1: on fire. True, it was about nine hundred feet long
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  Speaker 1: and two or three hundred wide, but then under the
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  Speaker 1: present circumstances, it necessarily appeared rather insignificant. And besides it
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  Speaker 1: was so distant from us. I forgot to say that
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  Speaker 1: the noise made by the bubbling lava is not great.
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  Speaker 1: Heard as we heard it from our lofty perch, it
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  Speaker 1: makes three distinct sounds, a rushing, a hissing, and a
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  Speaker 1: coughing or puffing sound. And if you stand on the
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  Speaker 1: brink and close your eyes, it is no trick at
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  Speaker 1: all to imagine that you are sweeping down a river
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  Speaker 1: on a large, low pressure steamer, and that you hear
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  Speaker 1: the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing
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  Speaker 1: from her escape pipes, and the churning rush of the
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  Speaker 1: water abaft her wheels. The smell of sulfur is strong,
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  Speaker 1: but not unpleasant to a sinner. We left the lookout
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  Speaker 1: house at ten o'clock in a half cooked condition because
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  Speaker 1: of the heat from Pele's furnaces, and wrapping up in
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  Speaker 1: blankets for the night was cold. We returned to our
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  Speaker 1: hotel end of Chapter seventy four