After resting an hour or two, driven to it by our torturing thirst, we went on, toiling painfully in the burning heat up the
lava slopes, for we found that the huge base of the mountain was composed entirely of
lava beds belched from the bowels of the earth in some far past age.
This is a stream which rises among the great bed of mountains north of the
Lava Plain, and after a winding course falls into Snake River.
Everywhere you go, in any direction, you find either a hard, smooth, level thoroughfare, just sprinkled with black
lava sand, and bordered with little gutters neatly paved with small smooth pebbles, or compactly paved ones like Broadway.
At fifty feet above the peak, in the midst of a rain of stones and scoriae, a large crater was vomiting forth torrents of
lava which fell in a cascade of fire into the bosom of the liquid mass.
(And so well did we, that for the rest of the cruise we were known as the "Three Sports.") Victor pointed out a pathway that disappeared up a wild canyon, emerged on a steep bare
lava slope, and thereafter appeared and disappeared, ever climbing, among the palms and flowers.
It is supposed that these vast plains are strewn with blocks of
lava from the neighboring volcanoes on its right, Ptolemy, Purbach, Arzachel.
In front of her a volcanic crater was pouring forth torrents of melted
lava, and hurling masses of rock to an enormous height.
This gully was about a third of the way up the mountain, and it was filled to the brim with red-hot molten
lava in which swam fire-serpents and poisonous salamanders.
Blackened rocks and mounds of
lava I had already seen everywhere peeping out from amid the luxuriant vegetation which draped them, but this asphalt pool in the jungle was the first sign that we had of actual existing activity on the slopes of the ancient crater.
A single green leaf can scarcely be discovered over wide tracts of the
lava plains; yet flocks of goats, together with a few cows, contrive to exist.
The place was a narrow passage between high walls of
lava, a crack in the knotted rock, and on either side interwoven heaps of sea-mat, palm-fans, and reeds leaning against the rock formed rough and impenetrably dark dens.
There were days when my heart was volcanic As the scoriac rivers that roll -- As the
lavas that restlessly roll Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek, In the ultimate climes of the Pole -- That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek In the realms of the Boreal Pole.