64 B. K. EMERSON — TETRAHEDRAL EARTB : [NTERCONTINENTAL SEAS 



canic ashes mingled with fire from the submerged caldera, and the iron 

 dissolved out of the lava, as described by Father Richard three centuries 

 ago, has made the water red as blood as far as the eye could see, and 

 great bombs, many cubic meters in size, as Fouqu6 reports, have fallen 

 like the star called Wormwood. Ships were shattered and sailors and 

 landsmen stifled in the noxious vapors. Sailors floated to sea dead in 

 their boats, and the survivors were blinded and suffered serious diseases 

 and fled away and hid themselves in the caves dug in the tuff beds up 

 the mountain side. Islands have risen from the sea or grown under 

 the eye of modern students. Other islands have disappeared, like Co- 

 lombo. Von Seebach, my teacher at Gottingen, fresh from the study 

 when I worked with him, told me many things of the volcano. Red hot 

 bombs crashed through the decks of a Prussian frigate, endangering her 

 magazines. One sails by a narrow passage into this submerged caldera, 

 and the black crater walls are livid from the red and yellow stains of 

 sulphurous exhalations. 



The surging outrush of the sulphurous vapors mingled in the night 

 with the glare of fiery lava masses formed the lake of fire and brim- 

 stone into which the angel with the key cast Satan for a thousand years, 

 and distant rumblings underneath the quiet waters of the harbor still 

 tell the simple seamen of the groans of the condemned. 



We may regret that we are now no more capable of producing an apoc- 

 alypse than of composing an epic. We may regret that we can not 

 reach the volcanic intensity of speech and thought when the will to 

 believe required no stimulus and eloquent 'and holy priests consigned 

 the swarming spirits of evil to sulphurous fires in splendid exorcisms, 

 like this from the Flagellum Daemonis of the Reverend Father Hieron- 

 ymus Mengus Vitellianensis : 



" By the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ which God hath given to make known unto 

 his servants those things which are shortly to take place, and hath signified, send- 

 ing his angel, I exorcise you, ye angels of untold perversity. And by all the won- 

 drous signs, terrible voices, mighty thunders and mystic visions which Saint John 

 beheld, I exorcise you, angels who entice unto evil deeds, that ye do go far away 

 from this creature. By the door which John saw open in heaven, by the four 

 and twenty thrones and the four and twenty elders and by the lightnings and 

 voices and thunders which proceeded out of the throne, by the sea which he saw 

 as it were of glass mingled with fire, by the four living beings full of eyes before 

 and behind, by the Lamb as it were slain, by the harps and the vial of gold full of 

 perfume, I charge you, O angels of death, to flee quickly out of this creature." 



Volcanic soils produce the richest and strongest wines. They promote, 

 we have seen, most eloquent theological imagery, and have been, we 

 shall see, fertile in a tropical luxuriance of geological imaginings. 



