6 



THE EASTERN PROVINCE 



4. STEAM lUSING FROM VOLCANIC CRACKS, EL BURRO 



between nearly 8,000 and 13,000 feet, one looks down, often over sheer 

 precipices, on to a relatively flat plain below — thirty miles, forty miles, 

 fifty miles broad — flanked on the opposite side by other mountain walls 

 nearly as tremendous in altitude. Although from these heights the Rift 

 Valley looks a smooth, flat plain, still its surface is studded every now 

 and then with a huge extinct volcano like Longonot (a grey-brown cone 

 with little vegetation on its sides), sierras and tongues of lava-covered 

 hills, and many little isolated craters. Between Suswa on the south (a 

 mountain as sterile in vegetation as Longonot) and Lake Nakuro on the 

 north, the signs of past and present volcanic activity are numerous, 

 "present" activity being represented by the steaming fissures in the 

 broken ground about El Burro. The rocks are quite warm about these 

 long cracks, from which steam is continually rising. The fissures look as 

 if they were quite a recent rent in the earth. I^ometimes this rent is so 

 sharply cut, and follows so straight a course, that it might be a military 

 entrenchment newly made by man. 



