Letters 23 



great crater was not very active, and contented itself 

 with throwing out great clouds of steam and volleys of 

 red-hot stones now and then. These were thrown to- 

 wards the south-west side of the cone, so that it was 

 practicable to walk all round the northern and eastern 5 

 lip, and look down into the Hell Gate. I wished you 

 were there to enjoy the sight as much as I did. No lava 

 was issuing from the great crater, but on the north side of 

 this, a little way below the top, an independent cone had 

 established itself as the most charming little pocket- 10 

 volcano imaginable. It could not have been more than 

 loo feet high, and at the top was a crater not more than 

 six or seven feet across. Out of this, with a noise exactly 

 resembling a blast furnace and a slowly-working high 

 pressure steam engine combined, issued a violent torrent 15 

 of steam and fragments of semi-fluid lava as big as one's 

 fist, and sometimes bigger. These shot up sometimes as 

 much as 100 feet, and then fell down on the sides of the 

 little crater, which could be approached within fifty feet 

 without any danger. As darkness set in, the spectacle was 20 

 most strange. The fiery stream found a lurid reflection 

 in the slowly drifting steam cloud, which overhung it, 

 while the red-hot stones which shot through the cloud 

 shone strangely beside the quiet stars in a moonless sky. 



Not from the top of this cinder cone, but from its 25 

 side, a couple of hundred feet down, a stream of lava 

 issued. At first it was not more than a couple of feet 

 wide, but whether from receiving accessions or merely 

 from the different form of slope, it got wider on its jour- 

 ney down to the Atrio del Cavallo, a thousand feet below. 30 

 The slope immediately below the exit must have been 

 near fifty, but the lava did not flow quicker than very 

 thick treacle would do under like circumstances. And 

 there were plenty of freshly cooled lava streams about, in- 



