hottest part of the floor and leave us our shoe-soles.  His pluck gave me back-bone.  We took one lantern and instructed the guides to hang the other to the roof of the look-out house to serve as a beacon for us in case we got lost, and then the party started back up the precipice and Marlette and I made our run.  We skipped over the hot floor and over the red crevices with brisk dispatch and reached the cold lava safe but with pretty warm feet.  Then we took things leisurely and comfortably, jumping tolerably wide and probably bottomless chasms, and threading our way through picturesque lava upheavals with considerable confidence.  When we got fairly away from the cauldrons of boiling fire, we seemed to be in a gloomy desert, and a suffocatingly dark one, surrounded by dim walls that seemed to tower to the sky.  The only cheerful objects were the glinting stars high overhead.

By and by Marlette shouted “Stop!” I never stopped quicker in my life.  I asked what the matter was.  He said we were out of the path.  He said we must not try to go on till we found it again, for we were surrounded with beds of rotten lava through which we could easily break and plunge down a thousand feet.  I thought eight hundred would answer for me, and was about to say so when Marlette partly proved his statement by accidentally crushing through and disappearing to his arm-pits.

He got out and we hunted for the path with the lantern.  He said there was only one path and that it was but vaguely defined.  We could not find it.  The lava surface was all alike in the lantern light.  But he was an ingenious man.  He said it was not the lantern that had informed him that we were out of the path, but his feet.  He had noticed a crisp grinding of fine lava-needles under his feet, and some instinct reminded him that in the path these were all worn away.  So he put the lantern behind him, and began to search with his boots instead of his eyes.  It was good sagacity.  The first time his foot touched a surface that did not grind under it he announced that the trail was found again; and after that we kept up a sharp listening for the rasping sound and it always warned us in time.

It was a long tramp, but an exciting one.  We reached the North Lake between ten and eleven o’clock, and sat down on a huge overhanging lava-shelf, tired but satisfied.  The spectacle presented was worth coming double the distance to see.  Under us, and stretching away before us, was a heaving sea of molten fire of seemingly limitless extent.  The glare from it was so blinding that it was some time before we could bear to look upon it steadily.

It was like gazing at the sun at noon-day, except that the glare was not quite so white.  At unequal distances all around the shores of the lake were nearly white-hot chimneys or hollow drums of lava, four or five feet high, and up through them were bursting gorgeous sprays of lava-gouts and gem spangles, some white, some red and some golden—­a ceaseless bombardment, and one that fascinated the eye with its unapproachable splendor.  The mere distant jets, sparkling up through an intervening gossamer veil of vapor, seemed miles away; and the further the curving ranks of fiery fountains receded, the more fairy-like and beautiful they appeared.