I made my report.  The two passengers disappeared.  They carried lunch and would not be back until night-fall.  We had orders to pitch a large tent at a suitable spot and to lighten ship of the doctor’s personal and scientific effects.  By the time this was accomplished, the two had returned.

“It’s all right,” Darrow volunteered to Captain Selover, as he came over the side.  “We’ve found what we want.”

Their clothes were picked by brush and their boots muddy.  Next morning Captain Selover detailed me to especial work.

“You’ll take two of the men and go ashore under Darrow’s orders,” said he.

Darrow told us to take clothes for a week, an axe apiece, and a block and tackle.  We made up our ditty bags, stepped into one of the surf boats, and were rowed ashore.  There Darrow at once took the lead.

Our way proceeded across the grass flat, through the opening of the narrow canon, and so on back into the interior by way of the bed through which flowed the sulphur stream.  The country was badly eroded.  Most of the time we marched between perpendicular clay banks about forty feet high.  These were occasionally broken by smaller tributary arroyos of the same sort.  It would have been impossible to reach the level of the upper country.  The bed of the main arroyo was flat, and grown with grasses and herbage of an extraordinary vividness, due, I supposed, to the sulphur water.  The stream itself meandered aimlessly through the broader bed.  It steadily grew warmer and the sulphur smell more noticeable.  Above us we could see the sky and the sharp clay edge of the arroyo.  I noticed the tracks of Darrow and Dr. Schermerhorn made the day before.

After a mile of this, the bottom ran up nearly to the level of the sides, and we stepped out on the floor of a little valley almost surrounded by more hills.

It was an extraordinary place, and since much happened there, I must give you an idea of it.

It was round and nearly encircled by naked painted hills.  From its floor came steam and a roaring sound.  The steam blew here and there among the pines on the floor; rose to eddy about the naked painted hills.  At one end we saw intermittently a broad ascending canon—­deep red and blue-black—­ending in the cone of a smoking volcano.  The other seemed quite closed by the sheer hills; in fact the only exit was the route by which we had come.

For the hills were utterly precipitous.  I suppose a man might have made his way up the various knobs, ledges, and inequalities, but it would have required long study and a careful head.  I, myself, later worked my way a short distance, merely to examine the texture of their marvellous colour.

This was at once varied and of great body—­not at all like the smooth, glossed colour of most rock, but soft and rich.  You’ve seen painters’ palettes—­it was just like that, pasty and fat.  There were reds of all shades, from a veritable scarlet to a red umber; greens, from sea-green to emerald; several kinds of blue, and an indeterminate purple-mauve.  The whole effect was splendid and barbaric.