letter xxix.] MIDNIGHT ON THE VOLCANO. 



271 



which followed might have been two minutes or a year, for 

 time was obliterated. 



Coldly the Pole-star shivered above the frozen summit, and 

 a blue moon, nearly full, withdrew her faded light into infinite 

 space. The Southern Cross had set. Two peaks below the 

 Pole-star, sharply defined against the sky, were the only signs 

 of any other world than the world of fire and mystery around. 

 It was light, broadly, vividly light ; the sun himself, one would 

 have thought, might look pale beside it. But such a light ! 

 The silver index of my thermometer, which had fallen to 23 

 Fahrenheit, was ruby red ; that of the aneroid, which gave the 

 height at 13,603 feet, was the same. The white duck of the 

 tent was rosy, and all the crater walls and the dull-grey ridges 

 which lie around were a vivid rose red. 



All Hawaii was sleeping. Our Hilo friends looked out the 

 last thing ; saw the glare, and probably wondered how we were 

 "getting on," high up among the stars. Mine were the only 

 mortal eyes which saw what is perhaps the grandest spectacle 

 on earth. Once or twice I felt so overwhelmed by the very 

 sublimity of the loneliness, that I turned to the six animals, 

 which stood shivering in the north wind, without any conscious- 

 ness than that of cold, hunger, and thirst. It was some relief 

 even to pity them, for pity was at least a human feeling, and 

 a momentary rest from the thrill of the new sensations inspired 

 by the circumstances. The moon herself looked a wan, un- 

 familiar thing — not the same moon which floods the palm and 

 mango groves of Hilo with light and tenderness. And those 

 palm and mango groves, and lighted homes, and seas, and 

 ships, and cities, and faces of friends, and all familiar things, 

 and the day before, and the years before, were as things in 

 dreams, coming up out of a vanished past. And would there 

 ever be another day, and would the earth ever be young and 

 green again, and would men buy and sell and strive for gold, 

 and should I ever with a human voice tell living human beings 

 of the things of this midnight ? How far it was from all the 

 world, uplifted above love, hate, and storms of passion, and 

 war, and wreck of thrones, and dissonant clash of human 

 thought, serene in the eternal solitudes ! 



Things had changed, as they change hourly in craters. The 

 previous loud detonations were probably connected with the 

 evolutions of some " blowing cones," which were now very 

 fierce, and throwing up lava at the comparatively dead end of 

 the crater. Lone stars of fire broke out frequently through 



