h ice below, was, I
must confess, anything but agreeable. However, I knew there was little
chance of another clear night before I leave this, and gave the word to
get up, somehow or other. So on we went, winding a little now and then,
or we should not have got on at all. By prodigious exertions we passed
the region of snow, and came into that of fire--desolate and awful, you
may well suppose. It was like working one's way through a dry waterfall,
with every mass of stone burnt and charred into enormous cinders, and
smoke and sulphur bursting out of every chink and crevice, so that it
was difficult to breathe. High before us, bursting out of a hill at the
top of the mountain, shaped like this [HW: A], the fire was pouring out,
reddening the night with flames, blackening it with smoke, and spotting
it with red-hot stones and cinders that fell down again in showers. At
every step everybody fell, now into a hot chink, now into a bed of
ashes, now over a mass of cindered iron; and the confusion in the
darkness (for the smoke obscured the moon in this part), and the
quarrelling and shouting and roaring of the guides, and the waiting
every now and then for somebody who was not to be found, and was
supposed to have stumbled into some pit or other, made such a scene of
it as I can give you no idea of. My ladies were now on foot, of course;
but we dragged them on as well as we could (they were thorough game, and
didn't make the least complaint), until we got to the foot of that
topmost hill I have drawn so beautifully. Here we all stopped; but the
head guide, an English gentleman of the name of Le Gros--who has been
here many years, and has been up the mountain a hundred times--and your
humble servant, resolved (like jackasses) to climb that hill to the
brink, and look down into the crater itself. You may form some notion of
what is going on inside it, when I tell you that it is a hundred feet
higher than it was six weeks ago. The sensation of struggling up it,
choked with the fire and smoke, and feeling at every step as if the
crust of ground between one's feet and the gulf of fire would crumble in
and swallow one up (which is the real danger), I shall remember for some
little time, I think. But we did it. We looked down into the flaming
bowels of the mountain and came back again, alight in half-a-dozen
places, and burnt from head to foot. You never saw such devils. And _I_
never saw anything so awful and terrible.

Roche had be