THE ISLANDS OF THE BAY OF BENGAL. 105 



We soon scrambled up into the broad river of lava which, 

 issuing on the further' side of the cone, apparently at two 

 different vents, has nearly entirely surrounded its base and 

 thence has flowed down to the sea. Once well inside the outer 

 cone the view is very striking ; in front rises the bare grey 

 marvellously regular and smooth cone, looking, but for its 

 vastness, more like the work of man than of nature, surmounted 

 by a thin line and tiny cloud of white vapour; around its 

 base, in front, behind, on all sides of one, stretches a sea of 

 mighty blocks of the blackest imaginable clinker, piled and 

 heaped together in the wildest confusion ; not a shrub, not a 

 blade of grass invades its terrible blackness ; above us tower 

 the inner walls of the original cone, here in perpendicular rock- 

 like steps, there in steep slopes of shifting ashes, purple, brown 

 and grey, for the most part bare and threatening, but in some 

 few places garnished with weird parched-looking grass and 

 stunted straggling trees. It was past noon, the sun had been 

 for hours blazing in its full tropical strength upon the bare 

 black lava sea ; not a breath was stirring ; a black thunder 

 cloud which had suddenly closed in the whole visible portion of 

 the sky, threw a deep unearthly shade, as of an eclipse, over the 

 whole interior, and as I toiled on amidst the intensely heated 

 and crackling blocks of cinders, which often entirely closed my 

 view, I, for the first time, fully realized some of the inspired 

 Italian's pictures of that region, the dread legend on whose 

 portals is ei abandon hope all ye who enter here !" 



A few minutes more and I had reached the further bank, 

 where, at the foot of the slope, a comparatively level strip, 

 sparcely clothed with tufts of coarse grass and dotted over 

 with a few miserable acacias, intervenes between the lava and 

 the walls of the amphitheatre. I searched the grass in vain 

 in hopes of finding some little warbler or quail, but in one of 

 the trees I soon heard the cheery note of the Red-whiskered 

 Bulbul (Otocompsa emeria), and later came across several 

 little parties of the Andaman Sun-bird (A. andamanicd). 

 These were the only birds that I saw or heard within this 

 natural "inferno." 



The cone itself, when closely approached, is seen to be 

 furrowed in many places by water-courses, and is by no 

 means so perfectly symmetrical and smooth as it appears 

 from a little distance. It is everywhere coated with, and 

 probably (though in one or two places masses of solid lava and 

 basalt peep through the outer covering,) in a great measure 

 composed of, reddish or greyish ash, and light cellular volcanic 



