Less Recent Craters In Great Numbers Dot The Adjacent Region, Some
With Lakes In Their Throats, Some Overgrown With Trees, Others Nearly
Bare - Telling Monuments Of Nature's Mountain Fires So Often Lighted
Throughout The Northern Sierra.
And, standing on the top of icy
Shasta, the mightiest fire-monument of them all, we can hardly fail to
look forward to the blare and glare of its next eruption and wonder
whether it is nigh.
Elsewhere men have planted gardens and vineyards
in the craters of volcanoes quiescent for ages, and almost without
warning have been hurled into the sky. More than a thousand years of
profound calm have been known to intervene between two violent
eruptions. Seventeen centuries intervened between two consecutive
eruptions on the island of Ischia. Few volcanoes continue permanently
in eruption. Like gigantic geysers, spouting hot stone instead of hot
water, they work and sleep, and we have no sure means of knowing
whether they are only sleeping or dead.
IV
A Perilous Night on Shasta's Summit
Toward the end of summer, after a light, open winter, one may reach
the summit of Mount Shasta without passing over much snow, by keeping
on the crest of a long narrow ridge, mostly bare, that extends from
near the camp-ground at the timberline. But on my first excursion to
the summit the whole mountain, down to its low swelling base, was
smoothly laden with loose fresh snow, presenting a most glorious mass
of winter mountain scenery, in the midst of which I scrambled and
reveled or lay snugly snowbound, enjoying the fertile clouds and the
snow-bloom in all their growing, drifting grandeur.
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