Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VI, November 1850, Vol. I. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ out and broken up into cakes, over which you will sometimes see the water running, and sometimes it will be quite hidden. In the same manner in this lake of fire, while its surface was generally covered with a crust of half-congealed, dusky lava, and raised into elevations, or sunk into depressions, you would now and then see the live coal-red stream running along. Two cakes of lava, also, would meet like cakes of ice, and their edges crushing, would pile up and fall over, precisely like the phenomena of moving fields of ice; there was, too, the same rustling, grinding noise.

      Sometimes, I am told, the roar of the fiery surges is like the heavy beating of surf. Once, when Mr. Coan visited it, this caldron was heaped up in the middle, higher above its brim than his head, so that he ran up and thrust in a pyrometer, while streams were running off on different sides. At another time when he saw it, it had sunk four or five hundred feet below its brim, and he had to look down a dreadful gulf to see its fires.

      Again, when Mr. Bingham was there, it was full, and concentric waves were flowing out and around from its centre. Having carefully observed its movements a while, he threw a stick of wood upon the thin crust of a moving wave where he thought it would bear him, even if it should bend a little, and then stood upon it a few moments. In that position, thrusting his cane down through the cooling tough crust, about half an inch thick, and immediately withdrawing it, forthwith there gushed up, like ooze in a marsh or melted tar under a plank, enough of the viscid lava to form a globular mass, which afterward, as it cooled, he broke off and bore away.

      It is not easy for one that has not himself been in a similar position, to sympathize with and pardon the traveler at such a point, for he is unwilling to forbear and leave it till fairly surfeited and seared with heat and admiration, or driven off by some sudden spout and roar, or splash of the caldron. You gaze, and gaze, and gaze in amazement, without conscious thought, like a man in a trance, reluctant to go away, and you want to spend at least a day and night, viewing close at hand its ever-varying phenomena.

      Had we only brought with us wrappers, I believe we should have been the first to have slept on the Black Ledge. Now that the edge of curiosity is a little blunted and the judgment cool, we can see that there would be a degree of hazard and temerity in it which is not felt under the excitement of novelty, and in the full tide of discovery. Forced by startling admonitions, of instant danger, I had to quit suddenly the precarious footing I had gained on the caldron's edge, like a hungry man hurried from his repast ere he has snatched a mouthful. But the look I caught there, and the impression of horror, awfulness, and sublimity thence obtained, live and will live in my conscious being forever and ever; and it is this shall help me utter what many have experienced, and have wished to say before the poet said it for them:

      "One compact hour of crowded life

      Is worth an age without a name."

      A moment of being under such circumstances is an epoch in the history of one's mind; and he, perhaps, may be deemed the most highly favored of mortals who has the most of such epochs in remembrance, provided only that the incommunicable thoughts and emotions which, in the moment of that experience, seemed to permeate the very substance of the mind, have given it a moral tone and impulse running through all its subsequent life. It is thus that thoughts are waked "to perish never," being instamped ineffaceably upon the spiritual frame-work and foundation stones of the soul, dignifying and consecrating them to noble uses.

      It was not, I trust, without some valuable additions to our stock of impressions in this line, that we reluctantly left that spot. Departing thence, we passed over a tract between the level of the brim of the caldron and the Black Ledge, in order to gain again the latter, most strangely rugged and wild, as if convulsion after convulsion had upheaved, and sunk, and rent, and piled the vast mineral and rocky masses; forming here great hills like the ruins of a hundred towers, and there deep indentations, while every block lay upon its fellow, ready to be dislodged, edge-wise, crosswise, endwise, sidewise, angle-wise, and every-wise, in the wildest confusion and variety possible, as if Typhœan giants had been hurling them at each other in war; or as when the warring angels

      "From their foundations loosening to and fro,

      Uptore the seated hills, with all their load,

      And sent them thundering upon their adversaries.

      Then hills amid the air encounter'd hills,

      Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire:

      Horrid confusion heap'd upon confusion rose."

      Rocks, too, in earthquake commotions, have been started from the perpendicular sides of the crater in this part, and have rolled down eight hundred or a thousand feet with a force, one might think, that would almost shake the world.

      When we had thus encompassed the crater, and had returned to the point where we first came down upon the Black Ledge, it was getting toward night, and I found myself so excessively heated and feverish, and throbbing with the headache, which most persons there suffer from, as to be unable to go for the castellated and Gothic specimens into some ovens that are found in the sides near by.

      Leaving, therefore, my companion and the natives to hunt for them, I proceeded slowly back, and toiled up, with difficulty, the steep side of this stupendous crater, which may be set down at a moderate calculation as not less than twelve miles in circumference, and one thousand feet deep. In the centre of this vast sunken amphitheatre of volcanic fire, a man looks up to heaven, and to the seared walls of this great prison, and feels like a pigmy, or the veriest insect, in contrast with so mighty and terrible a work of the Lord God Almighty.

      "A dungeon horrible on all sides round,

      As one great furnace flaming,"

      The person who can go down into it, and come up safe from it, with a light mind, unthankful and unawed, is as wanting in some of the best attributes of mental manhood as of piety; and, let me say with Cowper, the man who should prove himself so brutishly insensible to the sublime vestiges of Divine power, and to the providential care of Divine goodness.

      "I would not enter on my list of friends,

      Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,"

      We spent the night by the volcano. I slept a little at intervals, just raising myself at every awakening to look at Pele's fires, which spouted and played like fountains, and leaped suddenly with a flash from place to place, like electricity on wire in the experiments of the lecture-room.

      Once when I arose at midnight and went out a little beyond the range of our screen, to enjoy in silence the august and grand spectacle, the violence of the wind was such as to take off my unguarded hat, and carry it clear over the brink of the crater, where it lodged for the night, but was recovered with little injury in the morning by one of our courageous natives.

      One of the early visitors there said that, on coming near the rim, he fell upon his hands and knees awe-struck, and crept cautiously to the rocky brink, unwilling at once to walk up to the giddy verge and look down as from a mast-head upon the fiery gulf at his feet. In a little time, however, like a landsman after a while at sea, he was able to stand very near and gaze unalarmed upon this wonder of the world.

      I have myself known seamen that had faced unfearingly all the perils of the deep, and had rushed boldly into battle with its mammoth monsters, to stand appalled on the brink of Kilauea, and depart without daring to try its abyss. Gazing upon it, then, at midnight, so near its brink as we were, was rather venturing upon the edge of safety, as I found to my cost. But woe to the man that should have a fit of somnambulism on the spot where our tent was pitched that last night. Baron Munchausen's seven-leagued boots could hardly save him from a warm bath in flowing lava cherry-red.

      Morning broke again upon our open encampment, clear and bracing as upon the Green Mountains of Vermont. With fingers burned and bleeding from the climbing and crystal-digging of yesterday, we made all the dispatch possible in collecting and packing СКАЧАТЬ