THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



121 



I was utterly unprepared for the feel- 

 ings which thus overcame me. In 1916 I 

 had not stayed long enough in the valley 

 to get beyond the first sensations of won- 

 der and admiration. I had by no means 

 grasped the situation sufficiently to report 

 it accurately. This region should have 

 been named "The Valley of a Million 

 Smokes," for there are certainly not one, 

 but several millions of them all told. 



FEAR 01? CAVE-INS AND FUMES 



A large factor in my feelings was plain 

 fear. Perhaps I ought in honesty to say 

 cowardice. The spectacle was so much 

 bigger than I remembered it that I was 

 badly scared by the job I had undertaken. 

 The fear which beset me was twofold: 

 fear of cave-ins and fear of the fumes. 



As we explored the margin of the val- 

 ley (the worst place, as we afterward 

 found), we could plainly hear the ground 

 ring hollow beneath the tunks of our 

 staffs, and more than once we felt it shake 

 beneath our blows. What if the ground 

 should suddenly give way beneath our 

 feet and precipitate us into a steaming 

 caldron ? 



A breath of the steam from a vent 

 blown around us for a moment by a 

 chance breeze gave an uncomfortable 

 burn. We knew that if once a man fell 

 into such a place he would be instantly 

 parboiled. 



At first we roped up as for mountain- 

 climbing and spread out, so that if one 

 man went through, the others could pull 

 him out. But when we came better to 

 realize the conditions, we discarded the 

 ropes, for we decided that if a man once 

 got in it would be more merciful to leave 

 him than to attempt to pull him out. 



We had been assured by the best au- 

 thority that there could be no danger 

 from the fumes, but I had brought along 

 a chemist partly for the express purpose 

 of warning us as to what was not safe. 

 I knew this valley to be different from 

 every other place in the world, and rea- 

 soned that there could be no real basis 

 for the assurances given me. What I 

 feared was carbon monoxide, that color- 

 less, odorless, tasteless gas, deadly even 

 in concentrations as small as five parts in 

 10,000. It is usually present in the ema- 



nations from volcanoes. There is, more- 

 over, no simple chemical test by which its 

 presence may be detected. What if we 

 should get a dose of that before we were 

 aware of the danger? 



But, like practically all the bugaboos 

 which one meets in this world, these were 

 proved by experience to be much less 

 dangerous than our imaginations had pic- 

 tured. Experience showed that there was 

 always plenty of air to breathe, and we 

 found no insidious gases likely to strike 

 one down without warning, for our noses 

 always gave us abundant notice of dan- 

 gerous places, so that we suffered no in- 

 jury beyond slight headaches and tem- 

 porary inconvenience. 



LEARNING TO TRAVEE SAEEEY 



So also with the cave-ins. As we grew 

 familiar with the conditions we built up 

 a basis of experience that soon enabled 

 us to pick our way with some degree of 

 safety. The deposits brought up by the 

 fumaroles themselves so encrust their 

 throats and the ground round about that 

 a thin roof over a cavern will support 

 a man with safety. 



The worst places were those where fis- 

 sures had been bridged over by ash and 

 mud, so as to leave nothing to indicate 

 their presence. After we had been in the 

 valley several days we had some experi- 

 ences with such places that probably 

 would have turned us back had they oc- 

 curred when we first arrived. 



Several times, when we accidentally 

 put a foot through a thin place in the 

 crust, steam came spouting out of the 

 hole, forming a new fumarole. But it 

 was always one foot only and the owner 

 did not take long to get out. 



Once, while walking across a place that 

 looked perfectly solid, I noticed a new 

 hole midway between two old fissures and 

 on investigating found that a steaming 

 fissure two feet wide and ten feet deep 

 was roofed over for fifty feet by a layer 

 of mud so thin that I could perforate 

 it anywhere by a slight thrust with my 

 ice-ax. 



But such experiences rapidly led us to 

 perfect a. sort of technique like that of 

 the mountain-climber, which enabled us 

 to choose the safest paths. Moreover, 



