'V 



•^' * 



■• 



i 



I t 



V 



>. 



On the Recent Condition of Kilauea. 79 



w 



could stand on the very brink of the enclosing rim within a 

 dozen feet of the contents of the great cauldron, with only a 

 handkerchief or hat held before the face to guard against the 

 effects of the intense heat. The non-conducting power of lava in 

 respect to caloric was strikingly shown by an incident that oc- 

 curred during our visit. A Panama hat was accidently blown 

 from its wearers head, and deposited by the wind on a thin crust 

 of lava that had just stiffened and turned black on the surface of 

 the lake. Though all expected to see it instantly in flames, it 

 was slow in becoming charred, and five or six minutes elapsed 

 before it finally took fire and disappeared. In 1846 the only 

 lake or pool of molten lava in all the crater was the large one 

 we have been describing ; all the others noticed by previous ob- 

 servers had become extinct. Near the center of the crater the 

 writer visited a depression of great extent, and perhaps a hundred 

 feet in depth, very irregular in surface and outline, and full of 

 fissures and chasms from which volumes of steam and vapor 

 were issuing. This may have been the seat of one of the large 

 acwve centers of liquefaction described by former visitors. Not 

 far from this place, at the bottom of a chasm forty or fifty feet 

 deep, lava of a cherry red hue was discovered, and the orifice of 

 the pit was lined with beautiful incrustations of sulphur. A 

 very accessible and interesting point in the crater was about a 

 niile north of the Great lake, where a small cone or dome ten 

 or twelve feet high presented almost exactly the appearance of 

 an artificial furnace or oven. The walls of the dome were 

 scarcely more than a foot thick, and through two openings, the 

 one a foot and the other half a foot in diameter, the interior was 

 revealed of a glowing white heat, and by throwing pieces of 

 fl vi^"*"^ these orifices they were seen, to fall into the pasty, semi- 

 fluid mass ten or fifteen feet below. This furnace was in full 

 blast at the writers second visit, six weeks after the first. 



The exterior walls of the crater seem to the eye at a distance to 

 be nearly perpendicular. But this is far from being the fact, except 

 on the northern and western sides. The writer during the two 

 Visits referred to descended into the crater, or emerged from it, 

 at lour different points— first at the usual place of descent on the 

 northeast ; again by climbing up the slope where lava of the erup- 

 Ilf^j?^ 1S32 flowed down from the very top of the precipice to 

 the bottom at an inclination of not far from 45^ — a most hazard- 

 J>us place of exit ; next down a gentle slope to a sunken pla- 

 leau or terrace lying above and back of the sulphur banks on the* 

 southeastern side of the crater, and from this terrace by an equally 

 gentle slope to the bottom ; and lastly down the easy sandy de- 

 civity at the southern extremity of the crater, where the angle 

 ^ incUnation is not over twenty-five or thirty degrees. From 



numerous nositinnc i^« f\.r. ^r.^rT\r^ n«/1 xirifViin thp rmtPr PAmnacc 



A « 



a 



. '" 



V' 



- _ 4. 



% 



S - teVl- ' ^ 



