"For three weeks this terrific river disgorged itself into the sea with little abatement. Multitudes of fishes were killed, and the waters of the ocean were heated for twenty miles along the coast. The breadth of the stream where it fell into the sea, is about half a mile, but inland it varies from one to four or five miles in width, conforming, like a river, to the fall of the country over which it flowed. The depth of the stream will probably vary from ten to two hundred feet, according to the inequalities of the surface over which it passed. During the flow night was converted into day on all eastern Hawaii ; the light was visible for more than one hundred miles at sea ; and at the distance of forty miles fine print could be read at midnight.
"The whole course of the stream from Kilauea to the sea is about forty miles. The ground over which it flowed descends at the rate of one hundred feet to the mile. The crust is now cooled, and may be traversed with care, though scalding steam, pungent gases and smoke are still emitted in many places. In pursuing my way for nearly two days over this mighty smouldering mass, I was more and more impressed at every step with the wonderful scene. Hills had been melted down like wax ; ravines and deep valleys had been filled ; and majestic forests had disappeared like a feather in the flame. On the outer edge of the lava, where the stream was more shallow and the heat less vehement, and where of course the liquid mass cooled soonest, the trees were mowed down like grass before the scythe, and left charred, crisp, smouldering and only half consumed." There are numerous ver
tical holes in the lava, almost as smooth as the calibre of a can non, which represent the trunks of trees ; they were too green to burn when the lava flowed around them but succumbed later to subaerial decay.
"During the progress of the descending stream, it would often fall into some fissure, and forcing itself into apertures, and under massive rocks and even hillocks and extended plots of ground, and lifting them from their ancient beds, bear them with all their superincumbent mass of soil, trees, etc., on its viscous and livid bosom, like a raft on the water. When the fused mass was slug gish, it had a gory appearance like clotted blood, and when it was active it resembled fresh and clotted blood mingled and thrown into violent agitation. Sometimes the flowing lava would find a subterranean gallery diverging at right angles from the main channel, and pressing into it would flow off unobserved, till meet ing with some obstruction in its dark passage, when, by its ex pansive force, it would raise the crust of the earth into a dome like hill of fifteen or twenty feet in height, and then bursting this shell, pour itself out in a fiery torrent around. A man who was standing at a consideable distance from the main stream, and intensely gazing on the absorbing scene before him, found himself suddenly raised to the height of ten or fifteen feet above the com mon level around him, and he had but just time to escape from his dangerous position, when the earth opened where he had stood, and a stream of fire gushed out."42