wild goats—­twenty-two, I counted—­leisurely grazing along, and now and then casting glances down upon us.  They were domestic animals gone wild, and still retained their bizarre colors of white and black.  One big black leader with a long beard looked down at us and shook his head threateningly.  We reached the summit before the sun reached the horizon, and our eyes looked forth upon a strange world, indeed.  On one hand the vast sea of cloud, into which the sun was about to drop, rolled away from the mountain below us, with its white surface and the irregular masses rising up from it, suggesting a sea of floating ice.  Through rifts in it we caught occasional glimpses of the Pacific—­blue, vague, mystical gulfs that seemed filled with something less substantial than water.  On the other hand was the vast crater of Haleakala, two thousand feet deep, and many miles across, in which the shadows were deepening, and which looked like some burned-out Hades.

We stood or sat on the jagged edge and saw the day depart and the night come down, the glory of cloud and sea and sunset on the one hand, and on the other side the fearful chasm of the extinct volcano, red and black and barren, with the hosts of darkness gathering in it.  It was like a seat between heaven and hell.  Then later, when the Southern Cross came out and rose above the awful gulf, the scene was most impressive.

The crater of Haleakala is said to be the largest extinct crater in the world.  To follow all its outlines would lead one a distance of more than twenty miles, but it is so irregular in shape that one gets only a poor conception of its extent in a view from its brink.  At its widest part it cannot be more than four or five miles across.  It was evidently formed by the whole top of the mountain having been blown out or else sunk down in recent geologic times.  The fragments of jagged rock that thickly strew the surface all about the summit look as if they might have fallen there.  The floor of the interior of the crater is thickly studded with many minor craters, through which the internal fires found vent after the crater as a whole had ceased to act.  They are of the shape of huge haystacks, with a hole in the top, and looked soft and yielding in outline, and in color as though they were composed of soot and brick-dust.  One of them is much larger than any of the rest.  I thought it might be two hundred feet high.  “It is eight hundred,” said our guide; yet its summit was more than a thousand feet below the rim upon which we sat.

There has been no eruption in Haleakala since early in the last century.  Over a large area of the interior the black lava, cracked and crumpled, meets the eye.  Miles down one of its great arms toward the sea, we could see the green lines of vegetation, mostly rank ferns, advancing like an invading army.  Far ahead were the skirmishers, loose bands of ferns, with individual plants here and there pushing on over the black, uneven surface toward the secondary craters