river, flowing like honey, and yet so tough that you cannot thrust a
stick into it, and so heavy that great stones (if you throw them on it)
float on the top, and are carried down like corks on water. It is so hot
that you cannot stand near it more than a few seconds; hotter, perhaps,
than any fire you ever saw: but as it flows, the outside of it cools in
the cool air, and gets covered with slag and cinders, something like
those which you may see thrown out of the furnaces in the Black Country
of Staffordshire. Sometimes these cling together above the lava stream,
and make a tunnel, through the cracks in which you may see the fiery
river rushing and roaring down below. But mostly they are kept broken
and apart, and roll and slide over each other on the top of the lava,
crashing and clanging as they grind together with a horrid noise. Of
course that stream, like all streams, runs towards the lower grounds. It
slides down glens, and fills them up; down the beds of streams, driving
off the water in hissing steam; and sometimes (as it did in Iceland a few
years ago) falls over some cliff, turning what had been a water-fall into
a fire-fall, and filling up the pool below with blocks of lava suddenly
cooled, with a clang and roar like that of chains shaken or brazen
vessels beaten, which is heard miles and miles away. Of course, woe to
the crops and gardens which stand in its way. It crawls over them all
and eats them up. It shoves down houses; it sets woods on fire, and
sends the steam and gas out of the tree-trunks hissing into the air. And
(curiously enough) it does this often without touching the trees
themselves. It flows round the trunks (it did so in a wood in the
Sandwich Islands a few years ago), and of course sets them on fire by its
heat, till nothing is left of them but blackened posts. But the moisture
which comes out of the poor tree in steam blows so hard against the lava
round that it can never touch the tree, and a round hole is left in the
middle of the lava where the tree was. Sometimes, too, the lava will
spit out liquid fire among the branches of the trees, which hangs down