Volcano

“ Everywhere the sense of a fearful urgency, everywhere the feeling of a brooding and awful presence that overshadows the heavens with a cosmic menace. It is as though you are living on the slopes of some vast volcano whose eruptions may at any moment submerge all this phantasmal life in a sea of molten lava. And, hark! through the sounds of the roads and the streets, the chaffering of the market-place, the rush of motor-cars, the rhythmic tramp of men, there comes a dull, hollow roar, as from the mouth of a volcano itself. ”

“ On the surface of the seething lava in the throat of the volcano there gathers a rock foam, which, when hurled into the air, is cooled and falls as PUMICE,—a spongy gray rock so light that it floats on water. ”

“ Philalethes.—It is difficult to say whether there is more of sublimity or beauty in the scene around us. Nature appears at once smiling and frowning, in activity and repose. How tremendous is the volcano, how magnificent this great laboratory of Nature in its unceasing fire, its subterraneous lightnings and thunder, its volumes of smoke, its showers of stones and its rivers of ignited lava! How contrasted the darkness of the scoriæ, the ruins and the desolation round the crater with the scene below! ”

“ Thus, nearly two miles away, on this ledge of natural rock that juts from the mountain like a spur between the lava-beds on each side, one can hear the noise of the subterranean conflict as one cannot even under the mouth of the volcano. ”

“ Does its rock crust resemble the thick ice crust on the Arctic Seas, or is the earth, as later scientists believe, solid to the core? Is it heated so fiercely, miles below our feet, that at every release of pressure the solid rock bursts into molten lava? Is the steam from the contact of underground rivers and deep-lying fires the origin of the terrible rending powers of the volcano’s depths? ”

“ No one who has ever seen a volcano or “burning mountain” casting forth steam, huge red-hot stones, smoke, cinders and lava, can possibly forget the grandeur of the spectacle. At night it is doubly terrible, when the darkness shows the red-hot lava rolling in glowing streams down the mountain’s side. At times, indeed, the volcano is quiet, and only a little smoke curls from its top. Even this may cease, and the once burning summit may be covered over with trees and grass, like any other hill. ”

“ No woman's robe droops more delicately over her bosom than droops the once molten drapery of a volcano. Its aspect bears a double and opposed suggestiveness. Such are volcanoes in the day of their perfection, before the denuding forces have made inroads on the symmetry of their form. ”

“ Mighty masses of red-hot rock were flung high into the air from the throat of the volcano and fell back to earth, some on the mountain-sides and some on the squares and streets and buildings of the city, bursting in the midst of close-packed masses of men and women and children. ”

“ A lower peak, evidently also a dead volcano, stood out from the higher one like a huge flat-topped excrescence, completely surrounded, except where it joined the mountain, by a perfectly bare wall of rock and absolutely inaccessible. ”

“ As we ate our meal, and tried to warm our chilled bodies in the faint sunshine, a great mass of rock came hurtling down from the very summit, and leaped with an awful rushing sound into the chasm, and for long we heard its terrific progress into the uttermost depths of the volcano. ”

“ We drew within ten knots of the scene, and then came to anchor on a coral foundation—in water about twelve fathoms deep.
The scene of a great volcano, in process of eruption, is an event to be remembered throughout one's immortality. Words can but faintly express its grandeur, its terrible splendor. The painter's brush is powerless here, even if wielded by the hand of genius.
The noise of the eruption was terrible as we cast anchor, and the waves were running high, although there was but little wind. ”

“ This horrible volcano is by no means extinguished yet, but seems pregnant with wonders, principally combustible, and likely to break with one at every step, all the earth round it being hollow as a drum, and I should think of no great thickness neither; so plainly does one hear the sighings underneath, which some of the country people imagine to be tortured spirits howling with agony. ”

“ And now, I suppose, you will want to know what a volcano is like, and what a cone, and a crater, and lava are?
What a volcano is like, it is easy enough to show you; for they are the most simply and beautifully shaped of all mountains, and they are alike all over the world, whether they be large or small. Almost every volcano in the world, I believe, is, or has been once, of the shape which you see in the drawing opposite; even those volcanos in the Sandwich Islands, of which you have often heard, which are now great lakes of boiling fire upon flat downs, without any cone to them at all. ”

“ After the cold gust of wind there was an absolute stillness of the air. The thunder-charged mass hung unbroken beyond the low, ink-black headland, darkening the twilight. By contrast, the sky at the zenith displayed pellucid clearness, the sheen of a delicate glass bubble which the merest movement of air might shatter. A little to the left, between the black masses of the headland and of the forest, the volcano, a feather of smoke by day and a cigar-glow at night, took its first fiery expanding breath of the evening. ”

“ Even when every other trace of the volcano has been swept away, erosion will not have passed below this great stalk on which the volcano was borne as a fiery flower whose site it remains to mark. In volcanic regions of deep denudation volcanic necks rise solitary and abrupt from the surrounding country as dome-shaped hills. ”

“ Our usual impression of a volcano is indicated in the title of “burning mountain,” so often employed, a great fire-spouting cone of volcanic debris, from which steam, lava, rock-masses, cinder-like fragments, and dust, often of extreme fineness, are flung high into the air or flow in river-like torrents of molten rock. ”

“ The three main types of volcanic mountain.—If the eruptions at a volcanic vent are exclusively of the explosive type, the material of the mountain which results is throughout tuff or cinder, and the volcano is described as a cinder cone. If, on the other hand, the vent at every eruption exudes lava, a mountain of solid rock results which is a lava dome. It is, however, the exception for a volcano which has a long history to manifest but a single kind of eruption. ”

“ VOLCANIC NECKS. The pipe of a volcano rises from far below the base of the cone,—from the deep reservoir from which its eruptions are supplied. When the volcano has become extinct this great tube remains filled with hardened lava. It forms a cylindrical core of solid rock, except for some distance below the ancient crater, where it may contain a mass of fragments which had fallen back into the chimney after being hurled into the air. ”

“ Sometimes these fires burst forth from the crater of the volcano with tremendous force. The smoke becomes thick and black, and lurid flames shoot up to a height of hundreds of feet, making a scene of amazing grandeur.
With the flames there are thrown out stones, ashes, and streams of melted rock, called lava. This lava flows down the sides of the mountain, and, being red-hot, destroys every thing with which it comes in contact. At such times, a volcano is said to be in eruption. ”

“ It is different in the case of a volcano; for the volcanic craters are in many cases still left standing, and then there are the voluminous sheets of lava that have spread over great areas of the earth, as well as numerous volcanic cones. ”

“ High up over the rocks there was a small volcano, some fifteen feet in circumference, disgorging its bright flames much to the satisfaction of some of our party, who had not yet climbed Vesuvius or Ætna, or seen Stromboli in a state of eruption. ”

“ Take a film about the volcano, of which most children have heard but never seen. It would explain that a volcano throws up smoke, calcined dust, red-hot stones, and melted matter called lava. The summit is hollowed out in a great excavation having [33] the shape of a funnel, sometimes miles in circumference. The principal volcanoes could be shown, as Vesuvius, near Naples; Etna, in Sicily; Hecla, in Iceland.
A curtain of smoke filling the orifice of the crater denotes the forthcoming eruption. ”

“ In other words, a volcano is a boil or eruption upon the earth’s surface.
Scientists have advanced many theories concerning the primary causes of volcanoes, and many explanations relating to the igneous matter discharged from their craters. Like the doctors who disagree in the diagnosis of a human malady, the geologists and volcanists are equally unable to agree in all details concerning this form of the earth’s ailment. ”

“ When they looked back they saw flames shooting up from the top of the mountain, and then sinking in again, and again surging up. It is a phenomenon familiar to any one who has watched the top of a volcano—often even of iron-works—and which has been splendidly described in the account of the burning essence of life in She. ”

“ Near the summit, the traveller passes the crater of an extinguished volcano, having long perceived, throughout the whole district, the marks of volcanic eruption, and after a difficult climb of the extreme and precipitous ridge, gains the level of the plain above mentioned. ”

“ A volcanic eruption is generally preceded by low, rumbling sounds, and trembling of the earth's surface. Then follows greater activity of the volcano, from which dense volumes of smoke and steam issue, and fire and molten lava make their appearance. ”

“ Those who have seen the interior and surroundings of a terrestrial volcano after a recent eruption, and before atmospheric agents have exercised their dimming influences, must have been struck with the colours of the erupted materials themselves and the varied brilliant tints conferred on these materials by the sublimated vapours of metals and mineral substances which have been deposited upon them. ”

“ Igneous.—As the name denotes, igneous rocks have risen from the heated interior of the earth. In a modern volcano, lava ascends the central funnel, and, issuing from the lip of the crater or from lateral fissures, pours down the slopes of the cone in sheets of melted rock. The upper surface of the lava column within the volcano is kept in constant ebullition by the rise of steam through its mass. ”

“ A volcano, properly so called, exists only where a permanent connection is established between the interior of the earth and the atmosphere, and the reaction of the interior on the surface then continues during long periods of time. ”

“ Why, just five natives looking down at you in the crater, on the very eve of a serious outbreak of the volcano. Well, nobody's bound to risk his life to rescue a stranger from the jaws of an eruption. ”

“ As has been already remarked, many of the most prominent phenomena of a modern volcano are only of transient importance. The earthquakes and tremors, and the constant disengagement of steam and gases, that play so conspicuous a part in an eruption, may leave no sensible record behind them. ”

“ Fountain in lava lake, March 19, 1921
H. O. Wood, seismologist at the Volcano Observatory, was skilled [101] in compiling the volcano’s historical heights and depths of the nineteenth century and in plotting our curve of surveys of the liquid lava. ”

“ Some one has said that to cap a badly exposed pulp is to create a slumbering volcano, and he might well have added that such volcanoes have but a limited time to slumber. Gentlemen, there are in our own country ten thousand volcanoes belching forth—not pure molten lava—but impure gases and putrescent matter of the most sickening character. ”

“ I continually review my own geological muddles, the controversies over steam, flames, volcano swelling, explosion craters, layers in the crust, weighting and underflowing, continental uplift, the globe’s armor plate, contraction wrinkling of basins of sediment, submarine volcanoes, linear chains of volcanoes, siliceous shell, blocks lifted or sunk, planets solar or from the sun’s binary twin, original heat or radioactive heat, thick crust or thin shell, lava reservoirs or lava core, pregeology ancestors of volcanoes, and craters on the moon. ”

“ Strong fans draw air from various extinct craters, force it through ventilating ducts into every room and recess of the city, and exhaust it into the shaft of a quiescent volcano, in whose gaseous outflow any trace of our activities is, of course, imperceptible. ”

“ We have already seen that when an explosive volcanic eruption occurs there is suddenly thrown out of the crater of the volcano a huge column of various substances [Pg 181] that rises sometimes as high as 30,000 feet or even more. The smaller fragments of lava are quickly cooled and form volcanic ashes, sand, cinders, or dust. These are rapidly spread out by the wind in the form of a black cloud, that not only covers the mountain but reaches out over the surrounding country, completely shutting off the light of the sun. ”

“ Fires that shook me once, but now to silent ashes fall’n away.
Cold upon the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day. ”

“ On another occasion when they ascended the mountain, they were favoured with a strong wind, and going further than the guide would lead them, they went to the edge of the principal crater, and looked down into the great central hole of the volcano itself, where they saw little but smoke and a lurid glare. ”

“ As the streams of lava in a volcano run at different times in different directions, they radiate from the centre, or flow from lateral or eccentric orifices, as irregular tongues, and do not generally form continuous sheets covering the mountain. ”

“ A volcano is a mountain or hill, generally conical in shape, having at the top a nearly central opening, called a crater, from which at times melted rock and lava, vapor and gases escape. The lava either flows down the side of the mountain in a liquid condition, or is thrown upwards into the air. If the distance the lava is thrown upwards is sufficiently great the melted matter solidifies [Pg 4] before it falls to the earth. In such cases the largest fragments form what are called volcanic cinders, the smaller pieces, volcanic ashes, and the extremely small particles, volcanic dust. ”