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subterraneous tire. We also remarked in places, long ridges of 

 smoking masses and fragments of rock that had evidently been up- 

 heaved through the lava pavement, and piled confusedly upon 

 one another. The lava itself upon which we walked was sometimes 

 very hot, especially near steam vents and open abysses. The exha- 

 lations of suli^hurous acid and other noxious gases were also in 

 places an impediment to our explorations. The lava is generally 

 of a dull glossy lead-colour when quite cool ; but of a brighter gi'een 

 or blue when more recent. Symptoms of melting of the crust upon 

 which we walked, and increasing heat and vapour, came on 

 as we left the crater and regained the fresher atmosphere of 

 the upper world. 



After a night's rest in the grass-built hut on the verge of the rim 

 of the Kilauea crater — leaving my friend, whose strength was hardly 

 equal to the enterprise, to keep house at Kilauea — I started on foot 

 with three natives at early dawn on the morning of the 15th 

 November to ascend the "great mountain." After walking a 

 couple of miles we entered a wood, and commenced the actual 

 ascent ; in about two hours we began to emerge from the wood, 

 and by 9 p.m. we were fairly upon the bare lava. It was an old 

 lava stream with various species of Epacris, a red whortle-berry, 

 and similar plants growing in its crevices. Before us lay for miles 

 and miles a wilderness of stones and scori;e ; high up, far in the 

 distance, rose the wreaths of smoke that marked the site of the 

 new craters, the goal of my ambition. Our course this morning 

 had diverged a little to the north, and then again to the sovith of 

 west ; but now we made right for the upper crater on the rounded 

 back of Mauna Loa bearing about west. Before us lay a waste of 

 desolation ; on either hand belts of wood, that had escaped com- 

 paratively recent eruptions, struggled yet a little higher up the 

 mountain side. We passed several large caverns ; lava-formed 

 themselves, they had been once the ducts of streams of liquid 

 lava. Some heaps of stones marked a place where a horse, and if 

 I understood my natives rightly, some people had perished ; 

 how they got the horse so far ; how they could have hoped to get 

 him yet further, and for what joossible purpose they brought him 

 there at all, is a mysteiy to me, 'which my imperfect power of con- 

 versation did not enable me to solve. About 50 years before, and, 

 so far as I could ascertain, not far from that spot, a native army, 

 attempting to move from the eastern to the western side of the 

 island, with the design of issuing forth upon their enemies from 

 the gap between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, were smothered 

 by a shower of ashes, similar to that so graphically described by 

 Pliny,the younger, when Pompeii and Herculaneum Avere destroyed, 

 and in which the elder Pliny lost his life. Proceeding onwards over 

 lava and loose porous stones like pumice, only harder and some- 

 what heavier, we aiTived, at about 11 a.m., at a few bushes and 

 koa-trees, a little oasis of coarse grass, an old hut, and a deep 

 rock -pool of delicious water in a cave. Here we halted to refresh 

 ourselves, and then, leaving the old track which turns northward 

 leading to the north-west side of the island, and which was, 

 doutbless, that which the ill-fated army intended to pursue, we 

 kept on our toilsome ascent over bare lava, now absolutely destitute 



