Mount Pelion

“ On their right hand was the open sea, and on their left old Pelion rose, while the clouds crawled round his dark pine forests, and his caps of summer snow. And their hearts yearned for the dear old mountain, as they thought of pleasant days gone by, and of the sports of their boyhood, and their hunting, and their schooling in the cave beneath the cliff. And at last Peleus spoke: "Let us land here, friends, and climb the dear old hill once more. We are going on a fearful journey: who knows if we shall see Pelion again? Let us go up to Cheiron our master, and ask his blessing ere we start. ”

“ Hot mud falling from the cloud above stuck to the flesh of the unfortunate victims, causing bad wounds. Great blocks of stone were thrown out of the eastern side of the crater, which could be distinctly seen at a distance of four miles.”
Concerning the eruption of Mount Pelee, Mr. Hovey said: “An increase in the temperature of the lake in the old crater of Pelee was observed by visiting geologists as much as two years ago, while hot springs had long been known to exist near the western base of the mountain and four miles north of St. Pierre. ”

“ Shows a typical farm clearing in the forest.
Mount St. Helens, seen from Twin Buttes, twenty miles away, across the Cascades. View shows the remarkable cleft or canyon on the southeast face of the peak.
The slopes not covered with new lava sheets and dikes exhibit, below the snow-line, countless bombs hurled up from the crater, with great fields of pumice embedding huge angular rocks that tell a story not written on our other peaks. These hard boulders, curiously different from the soft materials in which they lie, were fragments of the tertiary platform on which the cone was erected. ”

“ Suddenly I wondered what those steam vents were doing. At first there had been one or two along the sea front; but now there were eight, ten, twenty, spurting high and scattered all over the volcano. A physician, Dr. Church, was standing near me, and we agreed that we disliked the outlook. Now there were forty jets, like so many ghostly locomotives run out from the Pelée roundhouse. Meanwhile, white-coated officers and scientists were scattered about in groups under the cliffs, some out of sight of Mount Pelée. ”

“ A singularly transparent air revealed every plain and peak on till the earth’s curve rolled them under remote horizons. The whole great disk of world outspread beneath wore an aspect of glorious cheerfulness. The Cascade Range, a roll of blue forest land, stretched northward, surmounted at intervals by volcanoes; the lower, like symmetrical Mount Pitt, bare and warm with rosy lava colors; those farther north lifting against the pale horizon-blue solid white cones upon which strong light rested with brilliance. ”

“ The strata of the summits cannot be discriminated at a distance. They are too near the laccolite in hardness to differ from it in the style of their sculpture.
Of the minor laccolites of the cluster there are three so closely joined to the chief that they merge topographically with the mountain. They are not well exposed for study. The smallest, which overlooks the pass between Mount Hillers and Mount Pennell (A, Figure 28) has probably lost the whole of its cover and with it so much of its substance that the original form and surface cannot be seen. Its floor is probably the Tununk sandstone. ”

“ Pierre on Monday night during the series of explosions from Mount Pelee, and was able to describe the volcanic eruption from close observation. Speaking personally of his expedition he said: “My attempt to examine the crater of Mount Pelee has been futile. I succeeded, however, in getting close to Morne Rouge. At seven o’clock on Monday night I [Pg 302] witnessed, from a point near the ruins of St. Pierre, a frightful explosion from Mount Pelee and noted the accompanying phenomena. While these eruptions continue, no sane man should attempt to ascend to the crater of the volcano. ”

“ Mont Pelée, the most awful evidence of natural force to be seen in the world to-day—La Pelée, majestic, terrible, overpowering, has been in evidence from starlight to starlight, but it is the ashen blank that was once the city of the Saint of the Rock that stands out most clearly in the kaleidoscopic maze slipping backward and forward before our eyes. ”

“ Our tent was pitched in a ravine near a small stream. Immediately after lunch, Peyto and I ascended 1000 feet on a mountain north of the valley with the purpose of discovering a pass. From this point we saw Mount Hector due south, and the remarkable mountain named Mount Molar, nearly due east. Three possible outlets from the valley appeared from our high elevation. Peyto set off alone to explore a pass toward the north, in the direction of the Pipestone Pass, while I made an examination of a notch toward the east. Each proved impossible for horses, if not for human beings. ”

“ At that epoch Mount Pilatus was known as Mons Fractus, Fracmont, or the Broken Mountain, owing to the jagged crag-like appearance of its summit. This descriptive name, however, was gradually supplanted by another, equally appropriate, that height—seldom free197 from clouds—being called Mons Pileatus, or the Capped Mountain. Every storm coming from the north or west gathers around this majestic peak, which serves as a natural barometer for all the people dwelling within sight of it. ”

“ In 1902, after the first explosion, Mount Pelée continued its eruptions for several months, and in the late stages there slowly rose, through the crater, this strange shaft of red-hot lava, like a great iron beam forged by giant hammers in Vulcan's famous blacksmith-shop. As it rose it crumbled and finally fell to pieces. It was forced up by the gases beneath and shaped by the crater through which it came; but can you conceive of anything more weird and awesome?
3. This middle zone is made up of different kinds of rock that require different degrees of heat to melt them. ”

“ Fourteen glaciers flow down its sides, the chief one, Nisqually Glacier, seven miles long, on the southern slope, being considered the finest on the coast south of Alaska. This mountain, like other peaks of the 512 Cascades, is an extinct volcano, its crater still emitting sulphurous fumes and heat. Mount St. Helens, not far away, which was in eruption in 1898, is regarded as the most active volcano in the range, its massive rounded dome rising over nine thousand feet. Across on the southwestern shore of Puget Sound is the capital of Washington State, Olympia, with five thousand people. ”

“ The Kern Plateau, so green and lovely on my former visit, in 1864, was now a gray sea of rolling granite ridges, darkened at intervals by forest, but no longer velveted with meadows and upland grasses. The indefatigable shepherds have camped everywhere, leaving hardly a spear of grass behind them.
To the sad annoyance of our hungry horses, we found this true until we entered the rough, rocky cañon which leads down from the false Mount Whitney, in whose depths, among glacier erratics and dark pines, we selected a spot where a vocal brook and patches of carex meadow seemed to welcome us. ”

“ A great obelisk of andesite (a stone not unlike basalt) was forced up from the crater. It rose rapidly, as much as five feet a day; and it reached altogether a height of 840 feet above the crater's lip. It was calculated to be about 300 feet in diameter at its base. It continued to push itself up for some months, sometimes sinking a little, sometimes rising like a colossal piston above a steam boiler. Its greatest height was 1100 feet above the height of Mount Pelée, and therefore at a height of 5143 feet above the sea-level. ”

“ Nearer the crater of Mont Pelee, the dust—'ashes' of the press reports, 'lapilli' of the books—lies like snow in drifts and sheets sometimes several feet in depth, and is mingled with fragments of pumice or bombs of denser rock, perhaps torn from the throat of the crater. Naturally the rock-rain was cool at Barbados and other remote stations; on St. Vincent, after the outbreak of La Souffriere, and on Martinique under each eruption of Mont Pelee, the falling rock was warm, even hot ”

“ And at last Pelias drove out Æson, his stepbrother, and took the kingdom for himself, and ruled over the rich town of Iolcus by the sea.
And Æson, when he was driven out, went sadly away from the town, leading his little son by the hand; and he said to himself, “I must hide the child in the mountains, or Pelias will surely kill him, because he{13} is the heir.” So he went up from the sea across the valley, through the vineyards and the olive groves, and across a foaming torrent toward Pelion, the ancient mountain, whose brows are white with snow. ”

“ Poliahu in legendary battles has met Pele many times. She has kept the upper part of the mountain desolate under her mantle of snow and ice, but down toward the sea most fertile and luxuriant valleys and hillside slopes attest the gifts of the goddess to the beauty of the island and the welfare of men.
Out of Mauna Loa, Pele has stepped forth again and again, and has hurled eruptions of mighty force and great extent against the maiden of the snow-mantle, but the natives say that in this battle Pele has been and always will be defeated. ”

“ He said that all his people knew the rock, and called it the Pelican Rock; and it stood on the plain long after Booran and his children's children's children were almost forgotten. To-day the plain is dry, and no water ever lodges there; but when the blacks see the Pelican Rock they think of the time when it was all in flood, when Tat-e-lak, the great Frog, nearly caused all the animals to die of thirst, and when Noy-Yang, the Eel, saved them by dancing on his tail on a mud-flat by the sea. ”

“ Pierre was in this zone; second, a zone of singeing, blistering flame, which also was fatal to all life, killing all men and animals, burning the leaves on the trees, and scorching, but not utterly destroying, the trees themselves; third, a large outer, nondestructive zone of ashes, wherein some vegetation was injured.
“The focus of annihilation was the new crater midway between the sea and the peak of Mount Pelee where now exists a new area of active volcanism, with hundreds of fumaroles or miniature volcanoes. The new crater is now vomiting black, hot mud, which is falling into the sea. ”

“ The air is oppressing; your nose burns. Are we going to die asphyxiated? What has to-morrow in store for us? A flow of lava, rain or stones or a cataclysm from the sea? Who can tell? Will give you my last thought if I must die.”
A St. Pierre paper of May 3 announces that an excursion arranged for the next day to Mount Pelee had been postponed, as the crater was inaccessible, adding that notice would be issued when the excursion would take place.
An inhabitant of Morne Rouge, a town of 600 inhabitants, seven kilometers from St. ”

“ Mount Pennell is nearly as smooth as Mount Ellen. Mount Ellsworth is nearly as rugged as Mount Holmes. One may ride to the crest of Mount Ellen and to the summit of Mount Pennell; he may lead his sure-footed cayuse to the top of Mount Hillers; but Mounts Ellsworth and Holmes are not to be scaled by horses. The mountaineer must climb to reach their summits, and for part of the way use hands as well as feet.
In a word, the ruggedness of the summits or the differentiation of hard and soft by sculpture, is proportioned inversely to the altitude. ”

“ Perhaps some of our readers may remember the great eruption of Mount Pelée, which took place in Martinique some years ago. At one stage of the eruption a great obelisk of rock a thousand feet high was pushed upwards out of the crater, and eventually sank back again. It came out of the depths of the earth. It was like a vent-peg plugging some boiling mass below. Similarly we might suppose that all volcanoes were vent-holes for the tremendous commotion of boiling fiery rocks below the -87- earth's surface. ”

“ The internal mechanism of Mont Pelee and La Souffriere is fairly clear in the light of what may be called the natural history of vulcanisni; for, just as the life history of organic orders and genera is traced only by aid of fossils, so the ontogeny of the volcano may be viewed in the light of the phylogeny traced through its fossil remains—lava sheets, tuff beds, laccolites, volcanic necks like those of the Mount Taylor plateau, and other products of organic action during the ages past. ”

“ Daily the little steamer takes a cargo from St. Pierre, for the ash from the volcano has enriched the soil, and the planters are growing wealthy. There are many more little houses and thatched huts tucked into corners of the ruins than appear at first sight, and a hotel has been built for the tourists who visit the strange spot.
The crater in Mont Pelée is silent now; the great vent which hurled white-hot rocks, incandescent dust and mephitic gases, is now covered with a thick green shrubbery, only here and there do small smoke-holes emit a light sulphurous vapor ”

“ One must be very sure of the weather before undertaking the ascent of Pelée; for if one merely selects some particular leisure day in advance, one's chances of seeing anything from the summit are considerably less than an astronomer's chances of being able to make a satisfactory observation of the next transit of Venus. Moreover, if the heights remain even partly clouded, it may not be safe to ascend the Morne de la Croix,—a cone-point above the crater itself, and ordinarily invisible below. ”