PREHISTORIC BOMBAl . 



them afat. Another moment, and there poured forth floods of 

 boiling liquid mud. Evidently the earthquakes musf have rent 



ne subterranean fissure, through which a groat volume of water 

 suddenly poured into the internal fires, generating a stupendous 

 volume of steam, which must have continued to increase, and so 

 become more and more compressed as volcanic fires and subterranean 

 waters continued their awful struggle, converting the foundation 

 of the mountain into a cyclopean boiler, which finally exploded, 

 with the result, a million times magnified, of the most awful boiler 

 explosion ever known above ground. 



"The convulsions of the mountain rent great chasms, from which 

 uprose jets of flame, ashes, and boiling water. The eruptions continued 

 for alxnit two hours. By 10 a.m. its violence was spent, though for 

 hours afterwards the ground trembled and quivered, as well it might 

 after so appalling a tit of passion. But in those two hours the whole- 

 face of thirty square miles of country (in the form of a vast fan 

 extending to a radius five miles from the central crater) was totally 

 changed. Of the mountain cone thus suddenly transformed into a 

 -t cam-boiler, there remains now only the back — a ragged overhang- 

 ing precipice, rising to a sheer height, variously estimated at 600 or 

 1,000 feet above a bottomless crater of about a mile in diameter. 

 Thence, with ceaseless roar, rise dense elouds of suffocating sulphur- 

 ous steam, which sometimes clear off sufficiently to allow adventur- 

 ous climbers a momentary glimpse of the seething mud below. 

 Those who have ascended that remnant of the mountain from the 

 slope behind it, and so have reached the brink of that precipice have 

 beheld such a picture of desolation as seems scarcely to belong to 

 this earth. All that was Little Bandai now lies outspread in a thick 

 layer of horrid mud, varying in depth from 10 to 150 feet — deep 

 enough to efface every accustomed feature in the whole area — and 

 1 1 self partially coated with layers of pale grey ash and black stones 

 mil rocks, which seem to have been ejected to such a height as not 

 to have fallen back to earth until the awful mud- wave had poured itsel f 

 out. It is now described as a wild chaos of earth, rock, and mud, 

 in some places resembling the concrete blocks of some cyclopean 



ak-water — in others rather suggesting a raging sea whose giganti< 

 have suddenly been congealed Of all that made the scene 

 13 



