The next night was appointed for a visit to the bottom of the
crater, for we desired to traverse its floor and see the “North
Lake” (of fire) which lay two miles away, toward the further
wall. After dark half a dozen of us set out, with lanterns and
native guides, and climbed down a crazy, thousand-foot pathway in
a crevice fractured in the crater wall, and reached the bottom in
safety.
The irruption of the previous evening had spent its force and
the floor looked black and cold; but when we ran out upon it we
found it hot yet, to the feet, and it was likewise riven with
crevices which revealed the underlying fires gleaming
vindictively. A neighboring cauldron was threatening to overflow,
and this added to the dubiousness of the situation. So the native
guides refused to continue the venture, and then every body
deserted except a stranger named Marlette. He said he had been in
the crater a dozen times in daylight and believed he could find
his way through it at night. He thought that a run of three
hundred yards would carry us over the hottest part of the floor
and leave us our shoe-soles. His pluck gave me back-bone. We took
one lantern and instructed the guides to hang the other to the
roof of the look-out house to serve as a beacon for us in case we
got lost, and then the party started back up the precipice and
Marlette and I made our run. We skipped over the hot floor and
over the red crevices with brisk dispatch and reached the cold
lava safe but with pretty warm feet. Then we took things
leisurely and comfortably, jumping tolerably wide and probably
bottomless chasms, and threading our way through picturesque lava
upheavals with considerable confidence. When we got fairly away
from the cauldrons of boiling fire, we seemed to be in a gloomy
desert, and a suffocatingly dark one, surrounded by dim walls
that seemed to tower to the sky. The only cheerful objects were
the glinting stars high overhead.
By and by Marlette shouted “Stop!” I never stopped quicker in
my life. I asked what the matter was. He said we were out of the
path. He said we must not try to go on till we found it again,
for we were surrounded with beds of rotten lava through which we
could easily break and plunge down a thousand feet. I thought
eight hundred would answer for me, and was about to say so when
Marlette partly proved his statement by accidentally crushing
through and disappearing to his arm-pits.
He got out and we hunted for the path with the lantern. He
said there was only one path and that it was but vaguely defined.
We could not find it. The lava surface was all alike in the
lantern light. But he was an ingenious man. He said it was not
the lantern that had informed him that we were out of the path,
but his feet. He had noticed a crisp grinding of fine
lava-needles under his feet, and some instinct reminded him that
in the path these were all worn away. So he put the lantern
behind him, and began to search with his boots instead of his
eyes. It was good sagacity. The first time his foot touched a
surface that did not grind under it he announced that the trail
was found again; and after that we kept up a sharp listening for
the rasping sound and it always warned us in time.
It was a long tramp, but an exciting one. We reached the North
Lake between ten and eleven o’clock, and sat down on a huge
overhanging lava-shelf, tired but satisfied. The spectacle
presented was worth coming double the distance to see. Under us,
and stretching away before us, was a heaving sea of molten fire
of seemingly limitless extent. The glare from it was so blinding
that it was some time before we could bear to look upon it
steadily.
It was like gazing at the sun at noon-day, except that the
glare was not quite so white. At unequal distances all around the
shores of the lake were nearly white-hot chimneys or hollow drums
of lava, four or five feet high, and up through them were
bursting gorgeous sprays of lava-gouts and gem spangles, some
white, some red and some golden—a ceaseless bombardment, and one
that fascinated the eye with its unapproachable splendor. The
mere distant jets, sparkling up through an intervening gossamer
veil of vapor, seemed miles away; and the further the curving
ranks of fiery fountains receded, the more fairy-like and
beautiful they appeared.
Now and then the surging bosom of the lake under our noses
would calm down ominously and seem to be gathering strength for
an enterprise; and then all of a sudden a red dome of lava of the
bulk of an ordinary dwelling would heave itself aloft like an
escaping balloon, then burst asunder, and out of its heart would
flit a pale-green film of vapor, and float upward and vanish in
the darkness—a released soul soaring homeward from captivity
with the damned, no doubt. The crashing plunge of the ruined dome
into the lake again would send a world of seething billows
lashing against the shores and shaking the foundations of our
perch. By and by, a loosened mass of the hanging shelf we sat on
tumbled into the lake, jarring the surroundings like an
earthquake and delivering a suggestion that may have been
intended for a hint, and may not. We did not wait to see.
We got lost again on our way back, and were more than an hour
hunting for the path. We were where we could see the beacon
lantern at the look-out house at the time, but thought it was a
star and paid no attention to it. We reached the hotel at two
o’clock in the morning pretty well fagged out.
Kilauea never overflows its vast crater, but bursts a passage
for its lava through the mountain side when relief is necessary,
and then the destruction is fearful. About 1840 it rent its
overburdened stomach and sent a broad river of fire careering
down to the sea, which swept away forests, huts, plantations and
every thing else that lay in its path. The stream was five miles
broad, in places, and two hundred feet deep, and the distance it
traveled was forty miles. It tore up and bore away acre-patches
of land on its bosom like rafts—rocks, trees and all intact. At
night the red glare was visible a hundred miles at sea; and at a
distance of forty miles fine print could be read at midnight. The
atmosphere was poisoned with sulphurous vapors and choked with
falling ashes, pumice stones and cinders; countless columns of
smoke rose up and blended together in a tumbled canopy that hid
the heavens and glowed with a ruddy flush reflected from the
fires below; here and there jets of lava sprung hundreds of feet
into the air and burst into rocket-sprays that returned to earth
in a crimson rain; and all the while the laboring mountain shook
with Nature’s great palsy and voiced its distress in moanings and
the muffled booming of subterranean thunders.
Fishes were killed for twenty miles along the shore, where the
lava entered the sea. The earthquakes caused some loss of human
life, and a prodigious tidal wave swept inland, carrying every
thing before it and drowning a number of natives. The devastation
consummated along the route traversed by the river of lava was
complete and incalculable. Only a Pompeii and a Herculaneum were
needed at the foot of Kilauea to make the story of the irruption
immortal.
