Fountains of Fire

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 91, 8 July 1927, Page 9

Fountains of Fire

Kilauea In Eruption By Cable. —Press Association. — Copyright. (Received 9.5 a.m.) HILO, Thursday. THE Kilauea volcano is in eruption. There is a spectacular flow of lava. Great explosions are followed by fountains of fire from the crater. The action is in the Halemaumau pit. where four fissures have opened, fire shooting 300 ft. Molten rivers, forming the base of the fountains, are slowly circling the pit.

famous Kilauea crater is in the east of Hawaii. On the east slope of the volcano Mauna Loa, about 4,000 feet above sea level, it is three miles long and two miles wide, and forms a constantly agitated lake of lava. Violent eruptions occurred in 1795, 18L’3. 1840 and 1868. The crater is a great shiny black lake some 3,000 acres in area with vapours rising in mystic wisps through the lava cracks. It is possible to span this crater on foot over a three-mile well-marked trail across the hardened lava to the firepit. To see the boiling lake of lava by day is a marvellous spell-binding sight, but to see it by night is to look into

the bowels of the earth in the making. When the lava is very active visitors remain for hours watching the fiery surf congealing from jagged carmine cracks to the black over-laving layer

of hardening lava; lurid fountains and pools; sparkling streams and falls heated to thousands of degrees.

Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes, has her last home in everactive Kilauea.

The main crater is about eight miles in circumference, but the firepit is only some 3,000 feet across, the livid lava varying throughout the year from a depth of several hundred feet to a point -where it overflows into the main crater, where it quickly hardens,