The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
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At Other Times The Smoke Partially
Lifting, But Still Swirling In Strong Eddies, Revealed A Central
Whirlpool Of Fire, Wallowing
At unknown depths, to which the lava,
from all parts of the lake, slid centrewards and downwards as into a
Vortex, where it mingled its waves with indescribable noise and
fury, and then, breaking upwards, dashed itself to a great height in
fierce, gory, gouts and clots, while hell itself seemed opening at
our feet. At times, again, bits of the lake skinned over with a
skin of a wonderful silvery, satiny sheen, to be immediately
devoured; and as the lurid billows broke, they were mingled with
misplaced patches as if of bright moonlight. Always changing,
always suggesting force which nothing could repel, agony
indescribable, mystery inscrutable, terror unutterable, a thing of
eternal dread, revealed only in glimpses!
It is natural to think that St. John the Evangelist, in some Patmos
vision, was transported to the brink of this "bottomless pit," and
found in its blackness and turbulence of agony the fittest emblems
of those tortures of remorse and memory, which we may well believe
are the quenchless flames of the region of self-chosen exile from
goodness and from God. As natural, too, that all Scripture phrases
which typify the place of woe should recur to one with the force of
a new interpretation, "Who can dwell with the everlasting burnings?"
"The smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever," "The place
of hell," "The bottomless pit," "The vengeance of eternal fire," "A
lake of fire burning with brimstone." No sight can be so fearful as
this glimpse into the interior of the earth, where fires are for
ever wallowing with purposeless force and aimless agony.
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