Two Gaps,
Thousands Of Feet Deep, Broke The Rim Of The Crater, And Through
These Ukiukiu Vainly Strove To Drive His Fleecy Herds Of Trade-Wind
Clouds.
As fast as they advanced through the gaps, the heat of the
crater dissipated them into thin air, and though they advanced
always, they got nowhere.
It was a scene of vast bleakness and desolation, stern, forbidding,
fascinating. We gazed down upon a place of fire and earthquake.
The tie-ribs of earth lay bare before us. It was a workshop of
nature still cluttered with the raw beginnings of world-making.
Here and there great dikes of primordial rock had thrust themselves
up from the bowels of earth, straight through the molten surface-
ferment that had evidently cooled only the other day. It was all
unreal and unbelievable. Looking upward, far above us (in reality
beneath us) floated the cloud-battle of Ukiukiu and Naulu. And
higher up the slope of the seeming abyss, above the cloud-battle, in
the air and sky, hung the islands of Lanai and Molokai. Across the
crater, to the south-east, still apparently looking upward, we saw
ascending, first, the turquoise sea, then the white surf-line of the
shore of Hawaii; above that the belt of trade-clouds, and next,
eighty miles away, rearing their stupendous hulks out of the azure
sky, tipped with snow, wreathed with cloud, trembling like a mirage,
the peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa hung poised on the wall of
heaven.
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