a column rushing up to the
height of ninety or one hundred feet against the gray night sky, with
mighty volumes of white steam cloud rolling after it and swept off by
the breeze to fall in torrents of hot rain. Jets and lines of water tore
their way through the clouds, or leaped high above its domed mass. The
earth trembled and throbbed during the explosion, then the column sank,
started up again, dropped once more, and seemed to be sucked back into
the earth. We ran to the basin, which was left dry, and looked down the
bore at the water, which was bubbling at the depth of six feet."

In the case of Strokr, the cause of this eruption is not difficult to
understand. The narrow part of the channel is choked up by the turf and
the steam, and prevented from escaping. Finally it gains such force as
to drive out the obstacle with a violent explosion, just as a bottle
of fermenting liquor may blow out the cork and discharge some of its
contents.

Geysers are somewhat abundant phenomena, existing in many parts of the
earth, while striking examples of them are found in the widely separated
regions of Iceland, New Zealand, Japan and the western United States.
In the volcanic region of New Zealand geysers and their associated hot
springs are abundant. It was to their action that we owed the famous
white and pink terraces and the warm lake of Rotomahana which were
ruined by the destructive eruption of Mount Tarawera, already described.

GEYSERS OF THE UNITED STATES

The United States is abundantly supplied with hot springs, but geysers,
outside of the Yellowstone region, are found only in California and
Nevada. Those of California exist chiefly in Napa Valley, north of San
Francisco, in a canon or defile. Their waters are impregnated not with
silica, but with sulphur, and they thus approach more nearly in their
character to mud-volcanoes, whose ejections are, in like manner, much
impregnated with that substance. They are also, like them, collected in
groups, there being no less than one hundred openings within a space of
flat ground a mile square. Owing to their number and proximity, their
individual energy is nothing like so violent as that of the geysers of
Iceland. Their jets seldom rise higher than 20 or 30 feet; but so great
a number playing within so confined a space produces an imposing effect.
The jets of boiling water issue with a loud noise from little conical
mounds, around which the ground is merely a crust of s