The mass of boiling lava is said to be about one and one half acres in extent.  Its surface is covered with large masses of floating crust, black and smooth, like leather or roofing-paper, and between these masses, or islands, the molten lava shows in broad, vivid lines.  It is never quiet.  When not actually boiling, there is a slow circulatory movement, and the great flakes of black crust, suggesting scum, drift across from one end to the other and are drawn under the rocks.  At one moment only this movement is apparent, then suddenly the mass begins to boil furiously all over the surface, and you hear dimly the sound of the bursting bubbles and the crash of the falling lava.  When this takes place, the black floating masses are broken up and scattered as they are in boiling maple-syrup, but they quickly reunite, and are carried on by the current as before.

Looking upon this scene with the thought of the traditional lake of fire and brimstone of our forefathers in mind, you would say that these black, filthy-looking masses floating about on the surface were the accumulation of all the bad stuff that had been fried out of the poor sinners since hell was invented.  How much wickedness and uncharity and evil thought it would represent!  If the poor victims were clarified and made purer by the process, then it would seem worth while.

At the Volcano House they keep a book in which tourists write down their impressions of the volcano.  A distinguished statesman had been there a few days before us, and had written a long account of his impressions, closing with this oratorical sentence:  “No pen, however gifted, can describe, no brush, however brilliant, can portray, the wonders we have been permitted to behold.”  I could not refrain from writing under it, “I have seen the orthodox hell, and it’s the real thing.”

That huge kettle of molten metal, mantling and bubbling, how it is impressed upon my memory!  It is a vestige of the ancient cosmic fire that once wrapped the whole globe in its embrace.  It had a kind of brutal fascination.  One could not take one’s eyes from it.  That network of broad, jagged, fiery lines defining those black, smooth masses, or islands, of floating matter told of a side of nature we had never before seen.  We lingered there on the brink of the fearful spectacle till night came on, and the sides of the mighty caldron, and the fog-clouds above it, glowed in the infernal light.  Not so white as the metal pouring from a blast furnace, not so hot, a more sullen red, but welling up from the central primordial fires of the earth.  This great pot has boiled over many times in the recent past, as the lava-beds we traveled over testify, and it will probably boil over again.  It has been unusually active these last few years.

About nine o’clock we rode back, facing a cold, driving mist, the back of each rider, protected by the shining yellow “slickers,” glowing to the one behind him, in the volcano’s light, till we were a mile or more away.