when winged by the energetic pen of the most
talented ad writer, cannot begin to convey the glowing, changing,
mysterious loveliness of this lake of unbelievable beauty. In fact, the
tourist, with expectation at fever-heat by the time he steps from the
auto-stage upon the crater rim, is silenced as much by astonishment as
by admiration.

Before him lies a crater of pale pearly lava several miles in diameter.
A thousand feet below its rim is a lake whose farthest blues vie in
delicacy with the horizon lavas, and deepen as they approach till at
his feet they turn to almost black. There is nothing with which to
compare the near-by blue looked sharply down upon from Crater's rim. The
deepest indigo is nearest its intensity, but at certain angles falls far
short.

Nor is it only the color which affects him so strongly; its kind is
something new, startling, and altogether lovely. Its surface, so
magically framed and tinted, is broken by fleeting silver wind-streaks
here and there; otherwise, it has the vast stillness which we associate
with the Grand Canyon and the sky at night. The lava walls are pearly,
faintly blue afar off, graying and daubed with many colors nearer by.
Pinks, purples, brick-reds, sulphurs, orange-yellows and many
intermediates streak and splash the foreground gray. And often
pine-green forests fringe the rim, and funnel down sharply tilted
canyons to the water's edge; and sometimes shrubs of livelier green find
foothold on the gentler slopes, and, spreading, paint bright patches.
Over all, shutting down and around it like a giant bowl, is a sky of
Californian blue overhead softening to the pearl of the horizon. A
wonder spectacle indeed!

And then our tourist, recovering from his trance, walks upon the rim and
descends the trail to the water's edge to join a launch-party around the
lake. Here he finds a new and different experience which is quite as
sensational as that of his original discovery. Seen close by from the
lake's surface these tinted lava cliffs are carved as grotesquely as a
Japanese ivory. Precipices rise at times two thousand feet, sheer as a
wall. Elsewhere gentle slopes of powdery lava, moss-tinted, connect rim
and water with a ruler line. And between these two extremes are found
every fashion and kind and degree of lava wall, many of them
precipitous, most of them rugged, all of them contorted and carved in
the most fantastic manner that imagination can picture. Caves open their
dar