with the geysers.

Imagine mighty green fields splattered with lime beds: all the flowers
of the summer growing up to the very edge of the lime. That was the
first glimpse of the geyser basins. The buggy had pulled up close to a
rough, broken, blistered cone of stuff between ten and twenty feet high.
There was trouble in that place--moaning, splashing, gurgling, and the
clank of machinery. A spurt of boiling water jumped into the air and a
wash of water followed. I removed swiftly. The old lady from Chicago
shrieked. "What a wicked waste!" said her husband. I think they call it
the Riverside Geyser. Its spout was torn and ragged like the mouth of a
gun when a shell has burst there. It grumbled madly for a moment or two
and then was still. I crept over the steaming lime--it was the burning
marl on which Satan lay--and looked fearfully down its mouth. You should
never look a gift geyser in the mouth. I beheld a horrible slippery
slimy funnel with water rising and falling ten feet at a time. Then the
water rose to lip level with a rush and an infernal bubbling troubled
this Devil's Bethesda before the sullen heave of the crest of a wave
lapped over the edge and made me run. Mark the nature, of the human
soul! I had begun with awe, not to say terror. I stepped back from the
flanks of the Riverside Geyser saying: "Pooh! Is that all it can do?"
Yet for aught I knew the whole thing might have blown up at a minute's
notice; she, he, or it being an arrangement of uncertain temper.

We drifted on up that miraculous valley. On either side of us were hills
from a thousand to fifteen hundred feet high and wooded from heel to
crest. As far as the eye could range forward were columns of steam in
the air, misshapen lumps of lime, most like preadamite monsters, still
pools of turquoise blue, stretches of blue cornflowers, a river that
coiled on itself twenty times, boulders of strange colours, and ridges
of glaring, staring white.

The old lady from Chicago poked with her parasol at the pools as though
they had been alive. On one particularly innocent-looking little puddle
she turned her back for a moment, and there rose behind her a
twenty-foot column of water and steam. Then she shrieked and protested
that "she never thought it would ha' done it," and the old man chewed
his tobacco steadily, and mourned for steam power wasted. I embraced the
whitened stump of a middle-sized pine that had grown all too close to a
hot pool's lip, and