58 Mr Charles Stewart's Account of the 



roaring and labouring with redoubled activity. The confusion 

 of noises was prodigiously great. In addition to all we had be- 

 fore heard, there was an angry muttering and rumbling from 

 the very bowels of the abyss, accompanied, at intervals, by what 

 appeared the desperate efforts of some gigantic power struggling 

 for deliverance. These sounds were not fixed or confined to 

 one place, but rolled from one end of the crater to the other ; 

 sometimes seeming to be immediately under us, when a sensible 

 tremor of the ground on which we lay took place, and then 

 again rushing to the farthest other extremit}' with incalculable 

 velocity. The whole air was filled with the tumult, and even 

 those most soundly asleep, were quickly roused by it to thorough 

 wakefulness. Every monition momentarily increased, and Lord 

 Byron springing up in his cot, exclaimed, " We shall certainly 

 have an eruption — such power must burst through every thing." 

 He had scarcely ceased speaking, when a dense column of black 

 smoke was seen rising from the crater, directly in front of us, — 

 the subterranean struggle at the same time ceased, and imme- 

 diately after, flames burst from a large cone, near which we had 

 been in the morning, and which then appeared to have been 

 long inactive. Red-hot stones, cinders, and ashes were also 

 propelled with immense violence, to a great height, and shortly 

 after the molten lava boiled over, and flowed down the sides of 

 the cone, and on the surrounding scoria, in two beautiful curved 

 streams, glittering with indescribable brilhancy. 

 . A whole lake of fire also opened in a more distant part. 

 This could not have been less than two miles in circumference, 

 and its action was more horribly sublime than any thing I ever 

 imagined to exist, even in the idler visions of unearthly things. 

 Its surface had all the agitation of an ocean — billow after billow 

 tossed its monstrous bosom in the air, and, occasionally, those 

 from opposite directions met, with such violence, as to dash the 

 fiery spray, in the concussion, forty or fifty feet high. It was 

 at once the most splendidly beautiful, and dreadfully fearful of 

 spectacles, and irresistibly hurried the thoughts to that lake of 

 fire, from whence the smoke of torment ascendeth for ever and 

 ever ! No work of Him who laid the foundations of the earth, 

 ever brought to my mind the awful revelations of his word 



