SANDWICH ISLANDS. 
183 
appears to have sunk, perhaps because the materials of the 
mountain, in that spot, have been partially consumed; it is 
fifteen or sixteen miles in circumference, and in the centre 
of it is the great crater. In many places the ground seemed 
hollow under our feet; it was rent by cracks and chasms, 
over some of which a thin crust of lava formed such dan¬ 
gerous bridges as thin ice across a torrent. Nothing warns 
of the danger of these holes, and it is not uncommon for 
persons to find the crust break under them, and so to slip 
through, when the only thing to be done is to throw their 
bodies forward, and extend their arms, and as the chasms are 
mostly very narrow, they are generally saved. At length 
we reached the edge of the crater; but words are totally 
inadequate to describe the effect produced on us by the 
first sight of that dark fiery gulf. From its brink, where we 
stood, we looked down for more than thirteen hundred feet, 
over rocks of lava and columns of sulphur, between whose 
antique fissures a few green shrubs and juicy berry-bearing 
plants had fixed themselves, to a rugged plain, where many 
a cone, raised by the action of the fire below, was throwing 
up columns of living flame, and whirls of smoke and vapour, 
while floods of liquid fire were slowly winding through 
scoriae and ashes, here yellow with sulphur, and there black, 
