Chapter LXXIV - Page 2

height toward the zenith. I
thought it just possible that its like had not been seen since the
children of Israel wandered on their long march through the desert so
many centuries ago over a path illuminated by the mysterious "pillar of
fire." And I was sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the
majestic "pillar of fire" was like, which almost amounted to a
revelation.

Arrived at the little thatched lookout house, we rested our elbows on the
railing in front and looked abroad over the wide crater and down over the
sheer precipice at the seething fires beneath us. The view was a
startling improvement on my daylight experience. I turned to see the
effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of
men I almost ever saw. In the strong light every countenance glowed like
red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded
rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity! The place below looked like
the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up
on a furlough.

I turned my eyes upon the volcano again. The "cellar" was tolerably well
lighted up. For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on
either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated; beyond
these limits the mists hung down their gauzy curtains and cast a
deceptive gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote
corners of the crater seem countless leagues removed--made them seem like
the camp-fires of a great army far away. Here was room for the
imagination to work! You could imagine those lights the width of a
continent away--and that hidden under the intervening darkness were
hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert--and even
then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on, and on!--to the fires and
far beyond! You could not compass it--it was the idea of eternity made
tangible--and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye!

The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as
ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was
ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of
liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad
map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight
sky. Imagine it--imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled net-
work of angry fire!

Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter, broken in
the dark crust, and in them the melted lava--the color a dazzling white
just tinged with yellow--was boiling and surging furiously; and from
these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like
the spokes of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while
and then swept round