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to my great delight. I hailed him, and he rejoined me ; I pointed 

 ont to him where I wonted to go " to sec the fire." He laconically 

 observed, " You go there, you see plenty ' fire,' " and sat down. I 

 went on. The eruption was here al)0ut three miles broad. Scramb- 

 ling with great difficulty, sometimes through hot hollows, where I 

 could hardly breathe, and sometimes jumping or stepping over 

 fissures through which the fire was visible, I reached the object of 

 my aim, the central crag of a huge arch, overhanging a lake of fire ; 

 a place, in fact, where the surface crust had blown up or fallen in, 

 exposing the flood to view for some acres. The crag seemed solid, 

 and I reached it ; I was scorched and almost blinded by the glare ; 

 I was as it were standing on a bridge, under which a river of fire as 

 large as the Thames was slowly and smoothly rolling, that is, visibly 

 as large, for, in reality, it was fully three miles wide in its under- 

 ground flow as shown by the cooled surface, and I had 

 reached about the middle. I stood so perpendicularly above 

 the stream as to be able to drop a large mass of lava into 

 the fire, and though the glare was too great to enable me 

 to see distinctly, I thus satisfied myself that the flow was 

 moving at the rate of about three knots an hour; in fact, 

 that its rate of speed had sensibly diminished from the time 

 I\Ir. Coan had estimated it. I was well satisfied when I rejoined 

 my native, and we proceeded upwards to the lower crater together. 

 Leaving on our right several large abysses and pits, we arrived 

 there. The ui:)per crust of the lava having cooled, the discharge 

 from the crater was not visible. Some dark fantastically shaped 

 rocks, some heaps of small stones, one of which, containing a 

 large proportion of sulphur, was burning most furiously with red and 

 blue flames, the whole surrounded by an ocean of partially cooled 

 lava ; such was the lower crater. IVIy native again very sensibly 

 sat down at a little distance ; I scrambled on as best I could, till 

 I reached one of the rocks forming the side of the crater, keeping 

 well to windward on account of the dense smoke. Lying down on 

 the warm stones, I attempted to look over, as it were, down a 

 gigantic chimney, to see into the boiling cauldron, which I heard 

 bubbling and seething. I got my head over the edge, and had 

 just time to see a long, broad, fissure, full of smoke, when I was 

 almost suflbcated with smoke and sulphurous acid gas, the efl'ects 

 of which I felt for some time afterwards, and thought myself 

 fortunate to escape in safety. 



Still ascending for aboxita mile or amile-and-a-half over the same 

 chaotic confusion of loose scoriaceous rocks, torn and burst asunder, 

 and lava warm and steaming, some of it lying in loose, flat dabs 

 or flakes, as if it had lieen thrown hot into the air and fallen 

 with a splash, we reached the upper crater at a height of about 

 12,000 ft. from the sea, or somewhat more. 



The upper crater was simply an irregular and imperfect basin, 

 of no great size, a hollow between two large mounds or hillocks 

 of small, loose stones, with an infinity of small steam and smoke 

 rents. Thence within it, and on the sides of the mounds, it sent up 

 volumes of red smoke, and partially ignited gases ; in one 

 place, from a small truncated cone, this was most apparent, the 

 exhalation rising like tho panting pufia of a steam engine. No 



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