Your guide will probably understand very little English:  let him be instructed in your wishes before you set out.  The native Hawaiian is the most kind and obliging creature in the world, and you will find your guide ready to do you every needful service.  You can get nothing to eat on the road, except perhaps a little sugar-cane; therefore you must provide a sufficient lunch.  At the Half-way House, but probably nowhere else, you will get water to drink.

When you reach the Volcano House, I advise you to take a sulphur vapor-bath, refreshing after a tedious ride; and after supper you will sit about a big open fire and recount the few incidents and adventures of the day.

The next day you give to the crater.  Unless the night is very foggy you will have gone to sleep with the lurid light of Kilauea in your eyes.  Madame Pele, the presiding goddess of the volcano, exhibits fine fire-works at night sometimes, and we saw the lava spurting up in the air above the edge of the smaller and active crater, one night, in a quite lively manner.  On a moderately clear night the light from the burning lakes makes a very grand sight; and the bedrooms at the little Volcano House are so placed that you have Madame Pele’s fire-works before you all night.

The house stands but a few feet from the edge of the great crater, and you have no tedious preliminary walk, but begin your descent into the pit at once.  For this you need stout shoes, light clothing, and, if you have ladies in your party, a heavy shawl for each.  The guide takes with him a canteen of water, and also carries the shawls.  You should start about nine o’clock, and give the whole day to the crater, returning to dinner at five.

The great crater of Kilauea is nine miles in circumference, and perhaps a thousand feet deep.  It is, in fact, a deep pit, bounded on all sides by precipitous rocks.  The entrance is effected by a series of steps, and below these by a scramble over lava and rock debris.  It is not difficult, but the ascent is tiresome; and it is a prudent precaution, if you have ladies with you, to take a native man for each lady, to assist her over the rougher places, and up the steep ascent.  The greater part of the crater was, when I saw it, a mass of dead, though not cold lava; and over this you walk to the farthest extremity of the pit, where you must ascend a tolerably steep hill of lava, which is the bank of the fiery lake.  The distance from the Volcano House to the edge of this lake is, by the road you take, three miles.

[Illustration:  HAWAIIAN TEMPLE, FROM A RUSSIAN ENGRAVING, ABOUT 1790.]

The goddess Pele, who, according to the Hawaiian mythology, presides over Kilauea, is, as some say all her sex are, variable, changeable, mutable.  What I shall tell you about the appearance of the crater and lake is true of that time; it may not have been correct a week later; it was certainly not true of a month before.  We climbed into the deep pit, and then stood upon a vast floor of lava, rough, jammed together, broken, jagged, steaming out a hot sulphurous breath at almost every seam, revealing rolls of later lava injections at every deep crack, with caverns and high ridges where the great mass, after cooling, was forced together, and with a steep mountain-side of lava at our left, along the foot of which we clambered.