letter xxix.] SIGHT-SEEING UNDER DIFFICULTIES. 255 



side ledge, but Mr. Green, in his scientific zeal, crossed the 

 crack, telling me not to follow him, but presently, in his ab- 

 sorption with what he saw, called to me to come, and I jumped 

 across, and this remained our perilous standpoint* 



Burned, singed, stifled, blinded, only able to stand on one 

 foot at a time, jumping back across the fissure every two or 

 three minutes to escape an unendurable whiff of heat and sul- 

 phurous stench, or when splitting sounds below threatened the 

 disruption of the ledge : lured as often back by the fascination 

 of the horrors below ; so we spent three hours. 



There was every circumstance of awfulness to make the im- 

 pression of the sight indelible. Sometimes, dense volumes of 

 smoke hid everything, and yet, upwards, from out " their sul- 

 phurous canopy " fearful sounds arose, crashings, thunderings, 

 detonations, and we never knew then whether the spray of 

 some uplifted wave might not dash up to where we stood. At 

 other times the smoke partially lifting, but still swirling in 

 strong eddies, revealed a central whirlpool of fire, wallowing at 

 unknown depths, to which the lava, from all parts of the lake, 

 slid centrewards and downwards as into a vortex, where it 

 mingled its waves with indescribable noise and fury, and then, 

 breaking upwards, dashed itself to a great height in fierce, gory 

 gouts and clots, while hell itself seemed opening at our feet. 

 At times, again, bits of the lake skinned over with a skin of a 

 wonderful silvery, satiny sheen, to be immediately devoured ; 

 and as the lurid billows broke, they were mingled with bright 

 patches as if of misplaced moonlight. Always changing, always 

 suggesting force which nothing could repel, agony indescribable, 

 mystery inscrutable, terror unutterable, a thing of eternal dread, 

 revealed only in glimpses ! 



It is natural to think that St. John the Evangelist, in some 

 Patmos vision, was transported to the brink of this " bottomless 

 pit," and found in its blackness and turbulence of agony the 

 fittest emblems of those tortures of remorse and memory, 

 which we may well believe are the quenchless flames of the 

 region of self-chosen exile from goodness and from God. As 

 natural, too, that all Scripture phrases which typify the place of 

 woe should recur to one with the force of a new interpretation, 

 " Who can dwell Avith the everlasting burnings ? " " The smoke 



* Since then, the Austins of Onomea were standing on a similar ledge, 

 when a sound as of a surge striking below, made them jump back hastily, 

 and in another moment the projection split off and was engulfed in the 

 fiery lake. 



