THE FIRE LAKE OF KILATUEA.

Evening Star, Issue 3901, 25 August 1875, Page 3

THE FIRE LAKE OF KILATUEA.

In her recent book on “The Hawaiian Archipelago,” Miss Bird thus describes the view on arriving at the brink of the crater of this volcano :—“I think we all screamed; I know we all wept, but we were speechless, for a new glory and terror had been added to the earth. It is the most unutterable of worldly things. The words of common speech are quite useless. It is unimaginable, indescribable—a sight to remember for ever, a sight which at once took possession of every faculty of sense and seul, removing one altogether out of the range of ordinary life, . . The prominent object was fire in motion, but the surface of the double lake was continually skimming over for a second or two with a cooled crust of a lustrous grey-white, like frosted silver, broken by jagged cracks of a bright rosecolor. The movement was nearly always from the sides to the centre, but the movement of the centre itself appeared independens, and always took a southerly direction. Before each outburst of agitation there was much hissing and a throbbing internal roaring, as Of imprisoned gases. Now it seemed furious, demoniacal, as if no power on earth could b nd it, then playful and sportive, then for a second languid, but only because it was accumulating fresh force. On our arrival eleven fire fountains were playing joyously round the lakes, and sometimes the six of the nearer lake ran together in the centre to go wallowing down in one vortex, from which they reappeared bulging upwards, till they formed a hugh cone thirty feet high, which plunged downwards into a whirlpool only to reappear in exactly the previous number of fountains in different parts of the lake, high leaping, raging, flinging themselves upwards. Sometimes the whole lake, abandoning its usual centripetal motion, as if impelled southwards, took the form of mighty waves, and surging heavily against the partial barrier with a sound like the Pacific surf, lashed, tore, covered it, and threw itself over it in clots of living fire. It was all confusion, commotion, force, terror, glory, majesty, mystery, and even beauty. And the color I ‘| Bye hath not seen ’ it! Molten metal has not that crimson gleam, nor blood that living light! Had 1 not seen this, I should never have known that such a color was possible.”