TIME AND CHANGE 
evil thought it would represent! If the poor victims 
were clarified and made purer by the process, then it 
would seem worth while. 
At the Volcano House they keep a book in which 
tourists write down their impressions of the volcano, 
A distinguished statesman had been there a fewdays 
before us, and had written a long account of his 
impressions, closing with this oratorical sentence: 
“No pen, however gifted, can describe, no brush, 
however brilliant, can portray, the wonders we have 
been permitted to behold.” I could not refrain from 
writing under it, “I have seen the orthodox hell, 
and it’s the real thing.” 
That huge kettle of molten metal, mantling and 
bubbling, how it is impressed upon my memory! 
It is a vestige of the ancient cosmic fire that once 
wrapped the whole globe in its embrace. It had a 
kind of brutal fascination. One could not take one’s 
eyes from it. That network of broad, jagged, fiery 
lines defining those black, smooth masses, or islands, 
of floating matter told of a side of nature we had 
never before seen. We lingered there on the brink 
of the fearful spectacle till night came on, and the 
sides of the mighty caldron, and the fog-clouds 
above it, glowed in the infernal light. Not so white 
as the metal pouring from a blast furnace, not so hot, 
a more sullen red, but welling up from the central 
primordial fires of the earth. This great pot has 
boiled over many times in the recent past, as the 
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