262 The National Geographic Magazine 



have been seriously affected by the erup- 

 tion. This area principally embraces a 

 triangle between Carbet, Pelee Peak, 

 and Precheur village. 



No Lava Flows. — There have been no 

 lava flows whatsoever, nor, owing to 

 the mineralogical character of the rocks, 

 would these hardly have been probable. 

 The solid ejecta from the mountain have 

 consisted of lapilli and blocks of pumice, 

 together with some of the old crater 

 material of previous eruptions. No true 

 bombs have been ejected, nor molten 

 rock in an)- form. Incandescent stone 

 or pumice has been blown from its top 

 at times and fell in showers immediately 

 around the crest, as was witnessed by 

 Mr Morse, of the Herald ',and the writer, 

 on May 25 ; but this quickly cools upon 

 reaching the air, and cannot be called 

 lava. 



No Subsidence or Uplift of Land or 

 Sea Bottom. — There has been no subsi- 

 dence or elevation of the land that can 

 be recorded, nor of the adjacent sea bot- 

 tom. The little rock of La Perle, a 

 half mile off the north coast, stands 

 there toda)' as it did when I first saw it, 

 five years ago ; the unmistakable bench- 

 mark of elevation or subsidence — the 



horizontal groove cut by the surf line 

 in the base of the cliffs — is everywhere 

 as it was, sprawled over by the same 

 spray-living mollusca and beds of algge. 



The onty change in the littoral are the 

 vicious little bites into the banks and 

 the mouths of the rivers made by the 

 return wave at the time of the great 

 eruption. 



No Fisswing Earthqicakes. — Neither 

 have there been any serious or positively 

 proven earthquakes resulting from the 

 rending of the earth along fissures. 

 Within a mile of St Pierre the bridges, 

 roads, houses, and trees stand unshaken. 

 Eyewitnesses testify that they felt no 

 quaking, only a force in the air which 

 tended to knock them over. On the 

 other hand, there have been jars and 

 tremors from the tremendous explosions 

 within the mountain, and these were of 

 sufficient force to break the cables. 



Measured by the geological standard, 

 only a new formation has been made 

 by a passing event in nature's work- 

 shop. 



Has nothing happened ? Ask the 

 30,000 mouldering dead, the sixth of 

 Martinique's population, which moulder 

 beneath the ashes of St Pierre. 



THE VOLCANO 



In describing the effects and phenom- 

 ena of the eruptions, I have almost for- 

 gotten the Hamlet of my story — the 

 volcano which has caused the trouble. 

 Across the weird landscape from the 

 summit of Pelee the volcano still sends 

 forth its occasional bursts of steam and 

 cloud, rising in great mushroom clouds 

 to 15,000 feet above the sea. At night 

 these are vivid with lightning flashes 

 and streaks of igniting gases. 



Within the summit bowl that existed 

 before the present eruption one can see 

 plainly through the broken nick a newly 

 built-up pile rising a hundred feet or 

 more and largely composed of tremen- 

 dous blocks of white pumice-stone which 



have been thrown out and accumulated 

 in the old vent. Through these are 

 seething wreaths of escaping steam. 



Down the dreary western slope, up 

 the valley of the Riviere Blanche, where 

 it is lost behind the hills, one can see 

 the smoke from another vent some 3,000 

 feet below the summit and not over two 

 miles from St Pierre. When the sum- 

 mit sends up its great seething mush- 

 room clouds, which float away, from 

 this lower vent may be seen another and 

 flimsier puff of 3'ellowish hue which 

 lingers near the ground. In all the 

 eruptions that I witnessed the columns 

 from the top of the mountain ascended, 

 while the smoke from the lower vent of 



