OBSERVATIONS AT KILAUEA.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XXVII, Issue 125, 29 May 1893, Page 4

OBSERVATIONS AT KILAUEA.

Science (U.S.)

Tbe crater is a huge depression or pit, about three miles long and two miles broad. The walls are mostly precipitous, though quite irregular, and the fioor is some three hundred feet below the surface of the island at that point. Forty years ago it was several hundred feet lower. Standing on the brink of the crater and looking down, one is reminded of a great cellar after a fire. Everything is black and rusty, and the smoke and steam coming up from dark clefts put you in mind of the charred and smoking timbers to be seen after a conflagration. A zigzag path, a mile.long, leads down through ferns aud bushes to the black lava, and then you step out on a sea of absolute desolation. The iava is cold now, but there are the mest abundant evidences of its recent fusion, The surface is greatly varied ; here being nearly smooth, and there swelling up into steep hillocks, perhaps with oaves beneath them, into which you can creep, or perhaps walk upright. Cracks abound, and out of some of them the hot slag has oozed, and flowed and cooled,^and hardened. After walking over two miles of this rough floor I came suddenly to the brink of a second pit in the floor of the greater one. This second pit, the " Halem' oum' ou " of the natives, is about half a mile in diameter, sand at the time of my visit its floor was some two hundred and fifty feet below the point where I was standing. Some adventurous climbers descended the

precipitous sides and actually stood on the ireshly-coolcd lava, but I did not accompany them. In the centre of this lower floor was the lake of molten lava, nearly circular in outline and about one thousand feet across. Its level surface was largely covered by a thin, grey crust, portions of which would often sink and reveal the glowing liquid beneath, The iiery lake was never free from agitations, particularly round its edges, but the extent and violence of the activity were constantly changing. Occasionally a liquid hillock would rise like an enormous bubble, then sink back again, while a pull" of thin blue smoke would slowly rise and float off from the spot, showing that in a condensed state it had doubtless been the lifting agent. But most of the agitation re-' seinbled the lively boiling of a kettle of water over a brisk lire. The glowing fountains would jump and dance in the wildest manner, often throwing up the fiery drops to a height of fifty feet, while "waves of lava would surge against the curb of the lake with a sound like that of ocean breakers, in the night time, seen through an opera glass, the display was beautiful and grand beyond description. The continual falling of half-cooled drops of lava around the edge of the lake, combined with the wash of fire-waves, serves to build up a curb, which grows in proportion to the activity of the lake. On one side of tho pool of melted rock its top was |some thirty feet higher than the floor winch joined the base of the curb to the walls of the pit. One night the lava rose in the lake aud poured over the curb on that side iv a magnificent cascade of fire. It was not possible to get in front of the overflow, but it was estimated that the stream was fifty feet wide. The motion of the current waslike that of c water cascade, but when the flood reached the floor of the pit it quickly begau to congeal on tho top, whilo tho under part ran on until it reached the coi.fihing wulls. Another ovei flow, who 1 o the curb was not co high, came directly toward my point of observation, aud I could clearly s.e that tho centre point of tho stream moved swiftly, causing the hardening waves to assume tho wcl'known crescent* form?. By such over, flows from the molten lake tli6 inner pit is being gradually filled up ; in fact, its floor has lisen several hundred feet the past few ycaiß. The lake rises jmri passu, the curb m ver rising very high above the floor. What the result will be is mi. certain, Should the lava continue to rise, the pit will soon be filled and will overflow into the basin of Kilauea itself. 13ut instead of this tho bottom of the pit may drop out, so to speak, as it did very suddenly before this hut rise, and instead of gazing into |a lake of fire the tourist may be compelled to look into a, hu^-o smoking hole some five or six hundred feet deep. Doubtless the whole floor of Kilauea rests on a very hot foundation, as the steam which ascends from, many cracks indicated; but at the time of my v i > i t there was no melted luv.t visible except in the lake which 1 have described.