120 
THE GEYSERS. 
moment. I was standing at the time on the 
brink of the basin, but was soon obliged to retire 
a few steps by the heaving of the water in the 
middle, and the consequent flowing of its agi¬ 
tated surface over the margin, which happened 
three separate times in about as many minutes. 
I had waited here but a few seconds, when the 
first jet took place, and this had scarcely sub¬ 
sided before it was succeeded by a second, and 
then by a third, which last was by far the most 
magnificent, rising in a column that appeared to 
us to reach not less than ninety feet in height, 
and to be in its lower part nearly as wide as the 
basin itself, which is fifty-one feet in diameter. 
The bottom of it was a prodigious body of white 
foam; higher up, amidst the vast clouds of steam 
that had burst from the pipe, the water was 
seen mounting in a compact column, which, at a 
still greater elevation, burst into innumerable long 
and narrow streamlets of spray, that were either 
shot to a vast height in the air in a perpendicular 
direction, or thrown out from the side, diagon¬ 
ally, to a prodigious distance*. The excessive 
* Darwin, in his Botanic Garden , vol. i. page 128, has a 
few lines upon the Geyser, which are rather more poetical 
than correct: 
High in the frozen north where Hecla glows, 
“ And melts in torrents his coeval snows 5 
