ripples and
strange contortions. Where else is a spectacle one-tenth as appalling so
comfortably and quickly reached?

Halemaumau is an irregular pit a thousand feet long with perpendicular
sides. Its depth varies. Sometimes one looks hundreds of feet down to
the boiling surface; sometimes its lavas overrun the top. The fumes of
sulphur are very strong, with the wind in your face. At these times,
too, the air is extremely hot. There are cracks in the surrounding lava
where you can scorch paper or cook a beefsteak.

Many have been the attempts to describe it. Not having seen it myself, I
quote two here; one a careful picture by a close student of the
spectacle, Mr. William R. Castle, Jr., of Honolulu; the other a rapid
sketch by Mark Twain.

"By daylight," writes Castle, "the lake of fire is a greenish-yellow,
cut with ragged cracks of red that look like pale streaks of stationary
lightning across its surface. It is restless, breathing rapidly,
bubbling up at one point and sinking down in another; throwing up sudden
fountains of scarlet molten lava that play a few minutes and subside,
leaving shimmering mounds which gradually settle to the level surface of
the lake, turning brown and yellow as they sink.

"But as the daylight fades the fires of the pit shine more brightly.
Mauna Loa, behind, becomes a pale, gray-blue, insubstantial dome, and
overhead stars begin to appear. As darkness comes the colors on the
lake grow so intense that they almost hurt. The fire is not only red; it
is blue and purple and orange and green. Blue flames shimmer and dart
about the edges of the pit, back and forth across the surface of the
restless mass. Sudden fountains paint blood-red the great plume of
sulphur smoke that rises constantly, to drift away across the poisoned
desert of Kau. Sometimes the spurts of lava are so violent, so
exaggerated by the night, that one draws back terrified lest some atom
of their molten substance should spatter over the edge of the precipice.
Sometimes the whole lake is in motion. Waves of fire toss and battle
with each other and dash in clouds of bright vermilion spray against the
black sides of the pit. Sometimes one of these sides falls in with a
roar that echoes back and forth, and mighty rocks are swallowed in the
liquid mass of fire that closes over them in a whirlpool, like water
over a sinking ship.

"Again everything is quiet, a thick scum forms over the surface of the
lake, dead, like the scu