hurled down mammoth trees, and licked up streams of water, and day and
night kept up an unintermitting cannonade of explosions. The steam
and imprisoned gases would burst the congealing surface with loud
detonations that could be heard for many miles. It was not an infrequent
thing for parties to camp out close to the flow over night. Ordinarily a
lava-flow moves sluggishly and congeals rapidly, so that what seems
like hardihood in the narrating is in reality calm judgment, for it is
perfectly safe to be in the close vicinity of a lava-stream, and even to
walk on its surface as soon as one would be inclined to walk on cooling
iron in a foundry. This notable flow finally ceased within half a mile
of Hilo, where its black form is a perpetual reminder of a marvellous
deliverance from destruction.

KILAUEA IN 1840

Kilauea seems never, in historic times, to have filled and overflowed
its vast crater. To do so would need an almost inconceivable volume of
liquid rock material. But it approached this culmination in 1840, when
it became, through its whole extent, a raging sea of fire. The boiling
lava rose in the mighty mountain-cup to a height of from 500 to
600 feet. Then it forced a passage through a subterranean cavity
twenty-seven miles long, and reached the sea forty miles distant, in two
days. The stream where it fell into the sea was half a mile wide, and
the flow kept up for three weeks, heating the ocean twenty miles from
land. An eye-witness of this extraordinary flow thus describes it:

"When the torrent of fire precipitated itself into the ocean, the
scene assumed a character of terrific and indescribable grandeur. The
magnificence of destruction was never more perceptibly displayed than
when these antagonistic elements met in deadly strife. The mightiest of
earth's magazines of fire poured forth its burning billows to meet the
mightiest of oceans. For two score miles it came rolling, tumbling,
swelling forward, an awful agent of death. Rocks melted like wax in its
path; forests crackled and blazed before its fervent heat; the works of
man were to it but as a scroll in the flames. Imagine Niagara's stream,
above the brink of the Falls, with its dashing, whirling, madly-raging
waters hurrying on to their plunge, instantaneously converted into fire;
a gory-hued river of fused minerals; volumes of hissing steam arising;
some curling upward from ten thousand vents, which give utterance to
as many deep-toned mutt