DESCENT INTO THE CRATER OF A VOLCANO.[18]
A descent into the Crater of the Volcano of Kilauea in the Sandwich Islands, may be accomplished with tolerable ease by the north-eastern cliff of the crater, where the side has fallen in and slidden downward, leaving a number of huge, outjutting rocks, like giants' stepping-stones, or the courses of the pyramid of Ghizeh.
By hanging to these, and the mere aid of a pole, you may descend the first precipice to where the avalanche brought up and was stayed--a wild region, broken into abrupt hills and deep glens, thickly set with shrubs and old ohias, and producing in great abundance the Hawaiian whortleberry (formerly sacred to the goddess of the volcano), and a beautiful lustrous blackberry that grows on a branching vine close to the ground. Thousands of birds find there a safe and warm retreat; and they will continue, I suppose, the innocent warblers, to pair and sing there, till the fires from beneath, having once more eaten through its foundations, the entire tract, with all its miniature mountains and woody glens, shall slide off suddenly into the abyss below to feed the hunger of all-devouring fire.
No one who passes over it, and looks back upon the tall, jagged cliffs at the rear and side, can doubt that it was severed and shattered by one such ruin into its present forms. And the bottomless pits and yawning caverns, in some places ejecting hot steam, with which it is traversed, prove that the raging element which once sapped its foundations is still busy beneath.
The path that winds over and down through this tract, crossing some of these unsightly seams by a natural bridge of only a foot's breadth, is safe enough by daylight, if one will keep in it. But be careful that you do not diverge far on either side, or let the shades of night overtake you there, lest a single mis-step in the grass and ferns, concealing some horrible hole, or an accidental stumble, shall plunge you beyond the reach of sunlight into a covered pen-stock of mineral fire, or into the heart of some deep, sunken cavern.
One can hardly wander through that place alone, even in the daytime (as I was in coming up from the crater at evening), without having his fancy swarm with forms of evil. In spite of himself, there will