The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire!  It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky.  Imagine it—­imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled net-work of angry fire!

Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter, broken in the dark crust, and in them the melted lava—­the color a dazzling white just tinged with yellow—­was boiling and surging furiously; and from these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like the spokes of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while and then swept round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession of sharp worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the fiercest jagged lightning.  These streams met other streams, and they mingled with and crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction, like skate tracks on a popular skating ground.  Sometimes streams twenty or thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing —­and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down small, steep hills and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their source, but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with alternate lines of black and gold.  Every now and then masses of the dark crust broke away and floated slowly down these streams like rafts down a river.  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.  Then the wide expanse of the “thaw” maintained a ruddy glow for a while, but shortly cooled and became black and level again.  During a “thaw,” every dismembered cake was marked by a glittering white border which was superbly shaded inward by aurora borealis rays, which were a flaming yellow where they joined the white border, and from thence toward their points tapered into glowing crimson, then into a rich, pale carmine, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a moment and then dimmed and turned black.  Some of the streams preferred to mingle together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then they looked something like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship’s deck when she has just taken in sail and dropped anchor—­provided one can imagine those ropes on fire.

Through the glasses, the little fountains scattered about looked very beautiful.  They boiled, and coughed, and spluttered, and discharged sprays of stringy red fire—­of about the consistency of mush, for instance—­from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along with a shower of brilliant white sparks—­a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood and snow-flakes!