SOUFEIERE, AND ON A VISIT TO MONTAGNE PELEE, IN 1902. 
451 
heat of the gases. At the upper limit of this Hat ground, aljove Lot 14, few trees 
were still standing; practically all were broken off at the base, their prostrate stems 
pointed down the slopes, their leaves and smaller branches had disappeared. Only the 
stoutest remained erect, mere columnar broken trunks without a branch. Here 
the destruction was quite as great as that of the most powerful tornado, the forest 
had been mown down as if by a mighty sickle (see Plate 35). The sides of 
the branches and trunks towards the crater were charred and eroded by the hot sand 
carried by the blast. The timber was green and had not been set on lire, but the 
hark and wood had been caiiied away on the weather side to depths of j; or an inch 
or more, while on the lee side the parched dry haiL still adhered and flaked away 
readily when touched with the finger nail. 
At a higher level still, about 1 500 feet, as a I'ule, everything was overturned, cut 
down or uprooted, only the trunks—blackened and half destroyed by tlie consuming 
blast, lay scattered on the slopes ; a single tree here and there had miraculously 
escaped. Even the large “cotton trees,” 8 to 10 feet in diameter, had been over¬ 
whelmed; nothing could resist the violence of the blast (see Plate 34, fig. 2). 
Nearer the summit all that was left of the rich forest tliat had clothed the hill 
with green, was the scattered, shapless fragments of burnt wood buried in the stinking 
black mud wliicli covered all the higher slopes. The destruction was so complete 
that it could not be said Avhetiier it vns to be ascribed to the heat of that tide of 
incandescent asli and superheated gases, or to the velocity with which it swept along 
the ground. Tlie mud lay thick on these parts of the hill, and it was not often that 
the old surface could Ije seen in the bottom of the rain p'ullies. The buried wood 
appeared to have been in every case uprooted, but we could not he certain whether 
the shapeless fragments we saw were the bases of the stems with the roots, or pieces 
of the ti'unks broken ofl'. (3ne thing was clear,—that blast of sand-laden gases 
must liave been at least bright red-hot when it welled over the lip of the crater, so 
completely had everything combustible been reduced to charcoal, when it had escaped 
entire destruction. And it is also certain that the passage of so enormous a volume 
of sand and stones over the surface must have wiped out all vegetation, cut down 
everything standing, and swept up all that could be caiiied away in its own 
moving mass. 
One of the most interesting features of the hot Iflast was the rapidity with which 
its velocity diminished as it swept Ifom the higher slopes down upon the plain. At 
Lot 14 no buildings were damaged by its force, and the trees liad not suffered more 
than if they had been exposed to an ordinary gale, if we allow for the high tempera¬ 
ture of the blast and the dust it caiiied with it. At a point a mile and a half furthe]’ 
up the hill, the destruction was more complete than that effected by a hurricane or 
tornado, and in so short a distance the velocity must have changed from perhaps 
100 miles an hour to 30 or 40 miles an hour. There are many reasons why this 
should have been the case. One of the most obvious is the change of gradient, 
3 M 2 
