n, they came upon a number of freshly
opened pits, evidently in some way the work of the volcano. Ascending
the last steep rise to the ridge behind Little Bandai-san, signs of
the great disaster grew in number and intensity.

The London Times correspondent, who was one of the party, wrote:
"Fetid vapors swept over us, emanating from evil looking pools. Great
trees, torn up by their roots, lay all around; and the whole face of
the mountain wore the look of having been withered by some fierce and
baleful blast. A few minutes further and we had gained the crest of
the narrow ridge, and now, for the first time, looked forth upon the
sight we had come to see. I hardly know which to pronounce the more
astonishing, the prospect that now opened before our eyes or the
suddenness with which it burst upon us. To the former no more fitting
phrase, perhaps, can be applied than that of absolute, unredeemed
desolation--so intense, so sad, and so bewildering that I despair of
describing it adequately in detail.

"On our right, a little above us, rose the in-curved rear wall of
what, eight days before, had been Sho-Bandai-san, a ragged, almost
sheer cliff, falling, with scarce a break, to a depth of fully 600
feet. In front of the cliff everything had been blown away and
scattered over the face of the country before it, in a roughly
fan-shaped deposit of for the most part unknown depth--deep enough,
however, to erase every landmark, and conceal every feature of the
deluged area. At the foot of the cliff, clouds of suffocating steam
rose ceaselessly and angrily, and with loud roaring, from two great
fissures in the crater bed, and now and then assailed us with their
hellish odor. To our eyes, the base, denuded by the explosion, seemed
to cover a space of between three and four square miles. This,
however, can only be rough conjecture. Equally vague must be all
present attempts to determine the volume of the disrupted matter. Yet,
if we assume, as a very moderate calculation, that the mean depth of
the debris covering a buried area of thirty square miles is not less
than fifteen feet, we find that the work achieved by this great mine
of Nature's firing was the upheaval and wide distribution of no fewer
than 700,000,000 tons of earth, rocks, and other ponderous material.
The real figure is probably very much greater."

The desolation beyond the crater, and the mighty mass thrown out by
the volcano which covered the earth, were almost in