This
floor, broken by lava-flows and cinder-cones, was as red and fresh
and uneroded as if it were but yesterday that the fires went out.
The cinder-cones, the smallest over four hundred feet in height and
the largest over nine hundred, seemed no more than puny little sand-
hills, so mighty was the magnitude of the setting. 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.
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