Lava bed

“ The Lava Bed is about four miles wide by seven long, and the Indians in these not exceeding 100, men and women and children, and they mean to stay there as long as they can. The location is the most inaccessible of any part of the world, I ever saw, and one man fairly secreted in it is more than equal to twenty engaged in trying to ferret him out. ”

“ The floor consists of the original lava-bed, and artificial puddles composed of slops and offal of divers unctuous kinds. Smoke fills all the cavities in the air not already occupied by foul odors, and the beams, and posts, and rickety old bits of furniture are dyed to the core with the dense and variegated atmosphere around them. This is a fair specimen of the whole establishment, with the exception of the travelers’ room. The beds in these cabins are the chief articles of luxury. ”

“ By this time our water was exhausted once more, and we were suffering severely from thirst, nor indeed could we see any chance of relieving it till we reached the snow line far, far above us. After resting an hour or two, driven to it by our torturing thirst, we went on, toiling painfully in the burning heat up the lava slopes, for we found that the huge base of the mountain was composed entirely of lava beds belched from the bowels of the earth in some far past age. ”

“ Lava itself may become indirectly the means of preserving terrestrial remains, by overflowing beds of ashes, pumice, and ejected matter, which may have been showered down upon animals and plants, or upon human remains. Few substances are better non-conductors of heat than volcanic dust and scoriæ, so that a bed of such materials is rarely melted by a superimposed lava-current. After consolidation, the lava affords secure protection to the lighter and more removable mass below, in which the organic relics may be enveloped. ”

“ Those located along the edge of the lava, near the cinder cone, I have known to contain ice and water as late as August. The largest I have seen is on the Mayfield Road, about twenty miles east of Bartles. It is situated in the barren lava, and in one of the warmest localities of the region,—and there are few cool spots in the lava anywhere. One enters the cave by crawling down a hole none too large. The instant the interior is reached the temperature falls in a surprising way. Not more than ten feet below the surface of the hot rocks is a bed of ice, covered by a foot or so of ice water. ”

“ Not a sound can be heard. No birds nor insects make their homes on these lava stretches. Yet do not think for a moment that nothing grows here. The moist air and the rains have been great workers, and, in some strange way, delicate ferns, nasturtiums, guavas, and even trees, have taken root, so that the lava-beds are nearly covered. ”

“ Similarly the rising yeasty lava under the curved ocean bed has to force its way sideways under the crust. It forces its way partly towards the land—where the mountains run along the coast as in the case of the Andes—or farther out underneath the ocean. Generally the movement of the lava will be towards the mountains till the trough gets broad and deep and the mountains very far away, and so high that their weight offers unexpectedly great resistance to the underground stream of lava. ”

“ Lavas with Tuffs.—It will probably be found that in many, if not in most cases, the outflow of lava was preceded, accompanied or followed by fragmental discharges. As far back as 1861, Jukes noticed that a toadstone band, about 50 feet thick, near Buxton consisted of two solid beds of lava "with beds of purple and green ash, greatly decomposed into clay, both above and below each bed and between the two." ”

“ There’s nothing like habit. Long practice may make sleeping on a solid rock go as well as a bed of down.
Rocks were piled on rocks, and deep and broad cracks and seams were seen at intervals. Across one chasm through which, deep in the earth, we could hear a stream of water running, was thrown a natural arch of lava, that served as a bridge where the road crosses. ”

“ This is a graveyard where lie buried thirty soldiers, most of whom met their fate out in the Lava Beds, as we learn by the boards marking the graves—a gloomy place to die in, and deadly-looking even without Modocs. The poor fellows that lie here deserve far more pity than they have ever received. Picking our way over the strange ridges and hollows of the beds, we soon came to a circular flat about twenty yards in diameter, on the shore of the lake, where the comparative smoothness of the lava and a few handfuls of soil have caused the grass tufts to grow taller. ”

“ As the freezing goes deeper, a firm stone roof may be formed across the gorge, which, when the current of lava ceases to flow from the crater, permits the lower part of the stream to drain away, leaving a long cavern or scries of caves extending far up the cone. The nature of this action is exactly comparable to that which we may observe when on a frosty morning after rain we may find the empty channels which were occupied by rills of water roofed over with ice; the ice roofs are temporary, while those of lava may endure for ages. ”

“ Now and then the surging bosom of the lake under our noses would calm down ominously and seem to be gathering strength for an enterprise; and then all of a sudden a red dome of lava of the bulk of an ordinary dwelling would heave itself aloft like an escaping balloon, then burst asunder, and out of its heart would flit a pale-green film of vapor, and float upward and vanish in the darkness—a released soul soaring homeward from captivity with the damned, no doubt. ”

“ Now woodland and crag, here again earth and soil are in the flood. The lava-river itself aids their supplies and adjusts the compliant material to its own course. But if perhaps in some deep valley it lags and stops, its rolling volume browses leisurely over the fields uneven as they are. Then it redoubles its billows and chides the laggard waves; as when a violent sea plunges headforemost with curving swell; and first it urges on its feeble waves, others beyond . . . advancing, it spreads far and wide, and choosing (what to envelop) . ”

“ Away, accordingly, we went in the gig to the little pier leading up to the merchant's house who had kindly promised Sigurdr to provide them. Everything in the country that is not made of wood is made of lava. The pier was constructed out of huge boulders of lava, the shingle is lava, the sea-sand is pounded lava, the mud on the roads is lava paste, the foundations of the houses are lava blocks, and in dry weather you are blinded with lava dust. ”

“ As our travellers moved forward, they felt that the lava grew hotter and hotter, and from every fissure issued gaseous fumes, which seriously affected their noses and throats; till, at last, when passed to leeward of the lava-river rolling from the lake, they were almost suffocated by the vapour, and it was with difficulty they pursued their advance. The lava was more glassy and had a look of greater transparency, as if it had been fused at an exceptionally high temperature ”

“ What a contrast between the wooded hillside adjoining, with its carpet of soft volcanic sand, and the jagged surface of the lava! Care must be taken in climbing over the lava, for the sharp points and angles are ever ready to tear one's shoes and hands. It cannot be many years since these hard, cold rocks formed a glowing mass of molten matter creeping quietly out of some hidden fissure which reached far down into the earth. The lava hardened as it became cold, just as does molten iron when led from the furnace to make a casting. ”

“ They found themselves in a vast dome-shaped cavern, thousands of yards in diameter and height. And almost in the centre of the floor, from a red and purple mound of cooling lava, leapt a white stream of molten matter from the floor to the dome. And in the black dome, where the lava turned to molten spray, hung countless stalactites of every color known to the artistic eye. And from the foot of the fountain ran a tortuous rivulet that lighted the walls and roof of a narrow chamber that extended for miles down toward the bowels of the earth. ”

“ The sombre color of the lava from which it has risen again and again after being swallowed up by it, as if it had found the seeds of renewed life in its own ashes, after the manner of the phœnix, the open plain which surrounds it, and the cruel reefs of lava which have taken root in its harbor, as if to darken with their stern shadow even the shimmer of the waves—everything about the city is majestic and melancholy. ”

“ Wonderfully restful is the dream life of the winterless seas of the coral caves, and yet even to-day fierce floods of boiling lava sometimes find their way over the seashore and down over the reefs, destroying the life of sea-moss and coral polyps, and surrounding shells and fish and crawling slugs or swift-moving eels with floods of turbid, boiling, death-dealing water in place of the clear waves through which they had been accustomed to journey. ”

“ The horses pick their way step by step over the sharp broken lava. But even here beautiful things are growing. There are delicate ferns, silvery grasses, pink, white, and brilliant blue berries. It seems as though Mother Nature wished to hide the frightful masses of black and gray lava.
Now the air gets very hot; steam and sulphur pour through great cracks in the [95] floor of the crater; the lava itself will burn if Auwae dares to touch it with her fingers. ”

“ Precipices rise at times two thousand feet, sheer as a wall. Elsewhere gentle slopes of powdery lava, moss-tinted, connect rim and water with a ruler line. And between these two extremes are found every fashion and kind and degree of lava wall, many of them precipitous, most of them rugged, all of them contorted and carved in the most fantastic manner that imagination can picture. Caves open their dark doors at water's edge. Towered rocks emerge from submerged reefs. A mimic volcano rises from the water near one side. Perpetual snow fills sheltered crevices in the southern rim. ”

“ The floor of the pit is paved with dark but iridescent lava, across which run irregular and ever-varying cracks of glowing gold. First one of these cracks, and then another, bubbles out into a roaring fire, the heat melts the adjacent lava, causing great dark masses to break off and slip into the furnace, where they are devoured by the flames. It is a fascinating spectacle which could be watched for hours. ”

“ The country is rough, and a great part of it hereabouts covered with rocks of lava. We passed one farm and farm-house where the meadows were beautifully green, strongly contrasting with the black, desolate appearance of the lava-covered hills. One tract was all rocks, without a particle of earth or vegetation in sight. The lava had once flowed over the ground, then it cooled and broke up into large masses, often leaving deep seams or cracks, some of them so wide that it took a pretty smart leap of the pony to plant himself safe on the other side. ”

“ The air feels like the breath of a sirocco, the tongue becomes parched and horny, and the mouth, nose, and eyes are incessantly assailed by the fine pulverized lava, which rises from the ground with the least breath of air. ”

“ But now, since daylight has been admitted, the whole mass is found to be nothing more than hard tufa, rendered, at the lower parts, still more compact by the percolation of water, which in all cases leaves the finest possible sediment. Lava is stone that has been actually melted, and flows over the surface in the same way as molten iron issues from a furnace. The beds of real lava may be easily distinguished in the upper levels of the earth laid open in these excavations. ”

“ We ladies, in our Bloomer dresses,—for it isn't safe to wear long skirts,—started down the precipice. At some of the steep places, our gentlemen tied ropes to the shrubs, and, with jumping and careful walking, we were soon down upon the lava floor.
"How did it feel to walk on the lava, aunty?" said Willie.
It seemed like walking on a snow-crust. Once in a while a foot would sink through, and this at first alarmed us; but we soon got used to it. There were many deep fissures in the lava, from some of which issued steam; these we used to jump over.
"How wide were they?" asked Harry. ”

“ Notwithstanding the high temperature of lava on emission, it cools so rapidly, and the consolidated lava conducts heat so slowly, that vegetable structures may be involved in a lava-flow without being entirely destroyed. A stream of lava on entering a wood, as in the sylvan region on Etna, may burn up the undergrowth but leave many of the larger trees with their trunks merely carbonized. On Vesuvius a lava-flow has been observed to surround trees while the foliage has been apparently uninjured. ”

“ We were then on the summit, which is, after all, not a summit at all, but an uneven waste, sloping away from the Cone in the center. This sloping lava waste was full of little cracks,—not fissures with hot lava in them, or anything of the sort,—out of which white steam issued, not unlike the smoke from a great patch of burned timber; and the wind blew it along the ground towards us. It was cool, for the sun was hidden by light clouds, but not cold. ”

“ We ascend, gradually, by stony lanes like rough broad flights of stairs, for some time. At length, we leave these, and the vineyards on either side of them, and emerge upon a bleak, bare region, where the lava lies confusedly in enormous rusty masses: as if the earth had been plowed up by burning thunder-bolts. And now we halt to see the sun set. The change that falls upon the dreary region, and on the whole mountain, as its red light fades, and the night comes on—and the unutterable solemnity and dreariness that reign around, who that has witnessed it can ever forget! ”