OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS. 



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if, on cooling, the lava had fallen about a foot. The surface was covered with a thin scaly 

 vitreous crust, which crumbled beneath the tread, sounding like snow on a cold morning, 

 and thus a very distinct path was made to the Haleinaumau, the enduring house of the 

 goddess Pele. The lava beneath this crust, however, was so hard as to give out abundant 

 sparks as the steel-nails in my shoes scraped upon it. When hard it was often iridescent, 

 like some anthracite coal, and so closely resembling this mineral that the difference would 

 hardly be detected on a cursory examination. The fresh lava exactly resembled that from 

 Mauna Loa in the flow of 1859. Three quarters of a mile over this uneven lava, and we 

 came to a long wall of lava composed of fragments of all sizes and shapes, very solid and 

 heavy and full of small grains of olivine ; and this wall, which is concentric with the main 

 wall of Kilauea, is said to rise and fall and sometimes disappear, which seems to be a fact, 

 although no one has ever seen it in motion. It is the fragments broken from the edge 

 of the crater by an eruption and floated out to its present position. An unpractised eye 

 would see no marks of fire 011 the rough granitedike masses. Caves, cracks, and ridges 

 make the surface very uneven, and after walking two miles we came to several large cracks 



Kir. US. Halemauinau. 



of great depth, but not more than a yard wide, and then a wall enclosing an amphitheatre 

 down which we climbed on the loose slabs of lava. 



The whole bottom of the crater is above what Prof. Dana describes as the Black Ledge, 

 and although no fire is visible over the northern and eastern portion, steam constantly rises 

 from many cracks, and the caves are often uncomfortably warm. When we were near the 

 Halemaumau, we came to a cone formed of spattered lava and cemented scoria?, some twenty- 



MEMOIRS HOST. BOC. NAT. HIST. Vol. I. Pt. .3. 



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