After the Krakatoa eruption all the geysers went mad together,
spouting, spurting, and bellowing till men feared that they would rip up
the whole field. Mysterious sympathies exist among them, and when the
Giantess speaks (of her more anon) they all hold their peace.

I was watching a solitary spring, when, far across the fields, stood up
a plume of spun glass, iridescent and superb, against the sky. "That,"
said the trooper, "is Old Faithful. He goes off every sixty-five minutes
to the minute, plays for five minutes, and sends up a column of water a
hundred and fifty feet high. By the time you have looked at all the
other geysers he will be ready to play."

So we looked and we wondered at the Beehive, whose mouth is built up
exactly like a hive; at the Turban (which is not in the least like a
turban); and at many, many other geysers, hot holes, and springs. Some
of them rumbled, some hissed, some went off spasmodically, and others
lay still in sheets of sapphire and beryl.

Would you believe that even these terrible creatures have to be guarded
by the troopers to prevent the irreverent American from chipping the
cones to pieces, or worse still, making the geysers sick? If you take of
soft-soap a small barrelful and drop it down a geyser's mouth, that
geyser will presently be forced to lay all before you and for days
afterwards will be of an irritated and inconsistent stomach. When they
told me the tale I was filled with sympathy. Now I wish that I had
stolen soap and tried the experiment on some lonely little beast of a
geyser in the woods. It sounds so probable--and so human.

Yet he would be a bold man who would administer emetics to the Giantess.
She is flat-lipped, having no mouth, she looks like a pool, fifty feet
long and thirty wide, and there is no ornamentation about her. At
irregular intervals she speaks, and sends up a column of water over two
hundred feet high to begin with; then she is angry for a day and a
half--sometimes for two days. Owing to her peculiarity of going mad in
the night not many people have seen the Giantess at her finest; but the
clamour of her unrest, men say, shakes the wooden hotel, and echoes like
thunder among the hills. When I saw her trouble was brewing. The pool
bubbled seriously, and at five-minute intervals, sank a foot or two,
then rose, washed over the rim, and huge steam bubbles broke on the top.
Just before an eruption the water entirely disappears from view.
Whenever you