50 HA WAIT AN O UIBE B OK. 



view of the crater and all that could be seen from the 

 mountain-top, and then an equally inimitable view of 

 Cloudland. There was the gaunt, hideous, desolate 

 abyss, with its fiery cones, its rivers and surges of black 

 lava and grey ash, crossing and mingling all over the 

 area, mixed with splotches of color and coils of satin 

 rock, its walls dark and frowning, everywhere riven 

 and splintered, and clouds perpetually drifting through 

 the great gaps, and filling up the whole crater with 

 white swirling masses, which in a few minutes melted 

 away in the sunshine, leaving it all as sharply definite 

 as before. Before noon clouds surrounded the whole 

 mountain, not in the vague, flocculent, meaningless 

 masses one usually sees, but in Arctic oceans, where 

 lofty icebergs, floes and pack, lay piled on each other, 

 glistening with the frost of a Polar winter ; then Alps 

 on Alps, and peaks of well remembered ranges gleaming 

 above glaciers, and the semblance of deep ravines load- 

 ed with new fallen snow. Snow-drifts, avalanches, 

 oceans held in bondage of eternal ice, and all this mass- 

 ed together, shifting, breaking, glistering, filling up the 

 broad channel which divides Maui from Hawaii, and far 

 away above the lonely masses, rose, in turquoise blue, 

 like distant islands, the lofty Hawaiian domes of Mauna 

 Kea and Mauna Loa, with snow on Mauna Kea, yet 

 more dazzling than the clouds. There never was a 

 stranger contrast than between the hideous desolation 

 of the crater below, and those blue and jeweled sum- 

 mits rising above the shifting clouds." 



EXTENT OP THE CRATER. 

 Prof. W. D. Alexander, in August, 1869, spent six 

 days making a thorough and accurate survey of the era- 



