414 On the Indian Archipelago. 



the Alps borrow from the atmosphere are sometimes displayed. The 

 Swiss, gazing on the lofty and majestic form of a volcanic mountain, 

 is astonished to behold, at the rising of the sun, the peaks inflamed 

 with the same rose-red glow which the snowy summits of Mont 

 Rosa and Mont Blanc reflect at its setting, and the smoke wreaths, 

 as they ascend from the crater into mid-air, shining in golden hues 

 like the clouds of heaven*. 



But serene in their beauty and magnificence as these mountains 

 generally appear, they hide in their bosoms elements of the highest 

 terrestrial sublimity and awe, compared with whose appalling energy, 

 not only the burs ten lakes and the rushing avalanches of the Alps, 

 but the most devastating explosions of Vesuvius or Etna, cease to 

 terrify the imagination. When we look upon the ordinary aspects 

 of these mountains, it is almost impossible to believe the geological 

 story of their origin, and if our senses yield to science, they tacitly 

 revenge themselves by placing in the remotest past the sera of such 

 convulsions as it relates. But the nether powers though imprisoned 

 are not subdued. The same telluric energy which piled the moun- 

 tain from the ocean to the clouds, even while we gaze in silent wor- 

 ship on its glorious form, is silently gathering in its dark womb, 

 and time speeds on to the day, whose coming science can neither 

 foretell nor prevent, when the mountain is rent ; the solid foundations 

 of the whole region are shaken ; the earth is opened to vomit forth 

 destroying fires upon the living beings who dwell upon its surface, or 

 closed to engulf them ; the forests are deluged by lava, or withered 

 by sulphureous vapours ; the sun sets at noonday behind the black 

 smoke which thickens over the sky, and spreads far and wide, rain- 

 ing ashes throughout a circuit hundreds of miles in diameter ; till it 

 seems to the superstitious native that the fiery abodes of the volcanic 

 dewas are disemboweling themselves, possessing the earth, and 

 blotting out the heavens. The living remnants of the generation 

 whose doom it was to inhabit Sumbawa in 1815 could tell us that 

 this picture is but a faint transcript of the reality, and that our ima- 

 gination can never conceive the dreadful spectacle which still appals 

 their memories. Fortunately these awful explosions of the earth, 

 which to man convert nature into the supernatural, occur at rare 

 intervals ; and though scarcely a year elapse without some volcano 

 bursting into action, the greater portion of the Archipelago being 

 more than once shaken, and even the ancient granitic floor of the 

 Peninsula trembling beneath us, this terrestrial instability has ordi- 

 narily no worse effect than to dispel the illusion that we tread upon a 

 solid globe, to convert the physical romance of geological history 

 into the familiar associations of our own lives, and to unite the events 

 of the passing hour with those which first fitted the world for the 

 habitation of man. 



We have spoken of the impression which the exterior beauty of 

 the Archipelago makes upon the voyager, and the fearful change 

 which sometimes comes over it, when the sea around him is hidden 



* M. Zollinger in describing Mount Semiru in Java notices this singular 

 resemblance to the mountains of his native country. 



