m on the surface of a lonely forest pool. Then
it shivers. Flashes of fire dart from side to side. The centre bursts
open and a huge fountain of lava twenty feet thick and fifty high,
streams into the air and plays for several minutes, waves of blinding
fire flowing out from it, dashing against the sides until the black
rocks are starred all over with bits of scarlet. To the spectator there
is, through it all, no sense of fear. So intense, so tremendous is the
spectacle that silly little human feelings find no place. All
sensations are submerged in a sense of awe."

Mark Twain gazed into Halemaumau's terrifying depths. "It looked," he
writes, "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 network 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 in huge rainbow curves, or made a long
succession of sharp worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the
fiercest jagged lightning. Those streams met other streams, and they
mingled with and crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable
direction, like skate-tracks on a popular skating-ground. Sometimes
streams twenty or thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some
distance without dividing--and through the opera-glasses we could see
that they ran down small, steep hills and were genuine cataracts of
fire, white at their source, but soon cooling and turning to the richest
red, grained with alternate lines of black and gold. Every now and then
masses of the dark crust broke away and floated slowly down these
streams like rafts down a river.

"Occasionally, the molten lava flowing under the superincumbent crust
broke through--split a dazzling streak, from five hundred to a thousand
feet long, like a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre after acre of
the cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edgewise like cakes of
ice when a great river breaks up, plunged downward, and were swallowed
in the crimson caldron. Then the wide expanse of the 'thaw' maintained a
ruddy glow for a while, but shortly cooled and