Lava field

“ The population numbers ten thousand.
Next day, the 13th of Nov., we drove the same distance over a wide, prairie-like, uncultivated plain, and a lava-field of twenty miles in width, the road through which was fearfully rough. This old lava underlies the soil—the rich, black loam, of the country—at a depth of three to six feet, for many square leagues. ”

“ Thereafter the volcanic forces began once more to eject a quantity of dust and scoriæ that fell into the water and spread along the bottom as a stratum of ash, and to pour out a current of lava which hardened into a great sheet visible now as the undermost greenstone of the section. - 256 - The emission of the lava seems to have terminated the eruption, for the next stratum is one of shale like that below the ash, so that the muddy sediment, the deposition of which was interrupted for a while by the volcanic products, began afresh to settle down along the sea-bottom. ”

“ They all have their Pele legends.
On the shortest path from Kumu-kahi to Kilauea is a great field of many acres of lava stumps. These, according to the best theories, were made by immense floods of lava pouring down upon large forests of living trees. Lava always cools rapidly on the surface, therefore, as the lava spread out through the forest, very soon there was a great floor of hot black stone pierced by a multitude of trees. ”

“ If the sheet of melted matter that spread out below the water were in the course of ages worn completely away, along with the strata subsequently piled above it, so as to leave merely a neck or dyke filling up the cavity through which the lava rose, we should pronounce the remnant intrusive, and could form no certain conclusion as to its age or as to whether its site had ever been a crater actively at work in throwing out lava and ashes. ”

“ Such masses are often called bosses, and seem not unfrequently to have been the craters of eruption whence great sheets of lava and showers of ashes were ejected far and wide over the neighbourhood. They serve to connect the intrusive traps, whose age is always more or less uncertain, with the bedded traps properly so called, the geological date of which can usually be sufficiently ascertained.
II. The bedded or contemporaneous trap-rocks consist of two well-marked kinds. There are, 1st, the melted rocks, such as greenstones and basalts and 2d, the tufas and volcanic ashes. ”

“ And I've dreamt I was a crater, possessed of a mad desire
[37] To vomit molten lava, and to snort big gobs of fire;
I've dreamt I was Roman candles and rockets that fizzed and screamed,—
In short, I have dreamt the cussedest dreams that ever a human dreamed:
But all the red-hot fancies were scattered quick as a wink
When the spirit within that pitcher went clinking its clinkety-clink.
Boy, why so slow in coming with that gracious, saving cup?
Oh, haste thee to the succor of the man who is burning up! ”

“ Up this we had to crawl on our hands and knees, as the wind sweeping around the mountain from the right, fearfully cold, and with unabated force, made it impossible to stand. The scoria ridge and masses of rock and gigantic boulders that rose up around, were covered with festoons of ice, and the whole mountain shone and glittered with a dazzling splendour. Above the white snow, the dark ridges of lava rose like stupendous walls, rugged, bare, and desolate, but adamantine and colossal in structure, as if the Architect of nature had intended them to endure for all time. ”

“ 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) . ”

“ 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. ”

“ For miles around, the rocks were spouting steam, hissing and roaring, and filling the whole air with pent-up gases from the great laboratory beneath; while burning streams of red-hot lava came rolling onward in stern, irresistible waves, now plunging in majestic grandeur over a deep precipice, or sweeping away the vegetation of the earth and shrivelling up huge forest trees in its relentless, solemn fury. ”

“ We know that in the Bay of Baiæ, in 1538, in Cutch in 1819, and on several occasions in Peru and Chili, since the commencement of the present century, the permanent upheaval or subsidence of land has been accompanied by the simultaneous emission of lava at one or more points in the same volcanic region. From these and other examples it may be inferred that the rising or sinking of the earth's crust, operations by which sea is converted into land, and land into sea, are a part only of the consequences of subterranean igneous action. ”

“ If you stand on the edge of a lava lake, like one of those on the islands of the Hawaiian group, the stifling fumes that rise might make you feel as if you were back at the beginning of the earth's history, when the solid crust was just a thin film on an unstable sea of molten rock, and this volcano but one of the vast number of openings by which the boiling lava and the condensed gases found their way to the surface. Then the rivers ran black with the waste of the rocky earth they furrowed, and there was no vegetation to soften the bleakness of the landscape. ”

“ The forest ended as suddenly as if one had stepped from a door-way, and a sloping dump of bare lava and cinders stretched upward endlessly; the whole cone visible, touched with scudding bits of thin white clouds. Every dike and seam of lava between the forest edge and the summit was clearly seen, and the square blocks of rest-houses, though miles away, stood out on the great ash-heap as if one could touch them. ”

“ After we had secured our horses in the small oasis, we went out to explore the country ahead. In every position along the steep incline up which we had to make our way we saw nothing but enormous scoria hills, stretching far and wide on every side, and which rose in long, steep ascents to the snow-line of the mountain. In every direction stupendous ridges of black trachytic lava cropped up above the surface, broken, rugged, and sharp, as if they had boiled up during some terrific volcanic convulsion, and then suddenly congealed into the most curious and fantastic shapes. ”

“ It is difficult for one who has not seen it to picture to himself the scene that lay around us. Devastation every where; lava covering the whole region in heaps upon heaps, fantastically piled one on the other. Here a huge isolated mound rises, seemingly cut off on all sides from the lava around; there we see how a mighty stream once rushed down the mountain-side, and cooled gradually into stone. Immense chasms are filled with lava masses, which have lain here for many years cold and motionless, and will probably remain for as many more, for their fury has spent itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is remarkable to observe, with what readiness and sang froid they inhabit the towns and villas on the brow of the mountain, and how quickly they return to spots which have suffered the most severely. The inhabitants are not much alarmed by a stream of lava, which moves slowly, from which they can always remove, and carry off their moveable property; their greatest danger consists in the clouds of burning ashes, which fly to a great distance, and the fall of which can neither be anticipated nor avoided. ”

“ The road was very rough, vegetation in many places destroyed, and in general we found ourselves passing over masses of lava, with deep crevices in some places and huge masses in others, while here and there the crust was so thin that it gave way beneath our feet. The heat was very great; but we found a red berry growing on a low bush, which was very refreshing. At length, after some hours of toil, we found ourselves standing on the summit of a cliff, while below us appeared a vast plain full of conical hills, and in the centre of it a mass of liquid lava like a wide lake of fire. ”

“ I agreed. “But, then again, the source may not be some mountain stream running off under the lava, as we have been supposing. It is quite possible that it is a spring which comes up through the sandstone, and not being able to get up to daylight because of the lava-cap, goes worming its way through innumerable crevices to the underground reservoir we suppose to exist somewhere beneath the surface of the Second Mesa.” ”

“ When we first began the ascent, the steep climbing told severely on our backs and legs, while the enormous protruding masses of porous lava which fringed the outside portion of the ridge, and over which we had to climb as much by our hands as by our feet, were as sharp as if they had cooled and crystallized but yesterday. ”

“ Fences are built across the fields of thin soil that cover the lava. Each inch of that land thrown up by fire "belongs" to some man. White houses stand at the edges of deep lava canyons running from the mountain tops to the sea's edge canyons made by pouring lava or by the splitting of the mountains under fearful pressure.
Children play about the blocks of lava—and all their lives, no matter where they may go, those children will think of that far-off island as the only real home, and of black lava blocks as the only REAL kind of stone. ”

“ Occasionally the molten lava flowing under the superincumbent crust broke through—split a dazzling streak, from five hundred to a thousand feet long, like a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre after acre of the cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edgewise like cakes of ice when a great river breaks up, plunged downward and were swallowed in the crimson cauldron. ”

“ The march downhill of this curious upstanding dyke of lava, grey against the more sombre tints of the range, may be traced in the masses of lava boulders through which the Rapaki water-course has cut its way in its lustier days. And if you turn your face southward and look far across the upper part of the harbour, near the western slopes of Mount Herbert, you will plainly see what seems a continuation of the remarkable wall of lava which welled ages ago white-hot from the cauldrons of Ruaimoko. ”

“ The surface over which the lava flowed seems to have been mainly terrestrial. Here and there, between the successive sheets of basalt, the leaves, stems, and fruit of land-plants, sometimes in most perfect preservation, may be observed, together with the remains of insects and fresh-water fish. Distinct relics of old river-channels can be recognized which have been buried under streams of lava. Among the deposits left by these streams the uppermost layers are commonly dark with decayed vegetation, while layers of coal are found here and there between the basalts. ”

“ 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. ”