202 CAMPS IN THE CARIBBEES. 
ward.” I entered the thicket of stunted trees with 
dense tops, and sat down. As I did so, the whistle 
of a soufriére-bird, that had emanated from it, sud- 
denly ceased, and I knew he had seen me and had 
flown. I waited a long time in silence, but they 
seemed to have been made aware of my presence, 
and only the distant murmur of their music came to 
me from different parts of the slope. Tired of this 
solitude, I started down the steep declivity. The first 
step taken beyond the range of my vision as I sat, 
plunged me into a hole to my neck; it had been con- 
cealed by ferns and mosses, and I slowly crawled out 
through them with painful exertion. 
I found that the surface was cut up into ravines 
and gullies, starting from the crater-rim. Probably 
the deepest of them were gouged out by the flood of 
lava that poured over the crater’s edge in that terrible 
outflow of volcanic wealth. Rain flowing through the 
loose volcanic ash may have cut the more recent, but 
it could not have descended with sufficient impetuosity 
to have hollowed out the deep well-holes and cut those 
deep ravines with perpendicular walls. Starting from 
the narrow edge of the crater, they spread out like 
a fan, furrowing the outer surface of the cone, grow- 
ing deeper, broader, and gloomier, until lost in the 
dark recesses below. Over all grew the small trees, 
densely crowded; ferns, filamentous yuccas, moss 
and wild pines covered the earth and rocks in impen- 
etrable confusion, so concealing the openings to the 
narrower gullies that it was impossible to ascertain 
their whereabouts without a very careful examination. 
It was into this wilderness that I plunged, floundering 
through tangled masses of branching fern and through 
