Shortly the crater11 came into view. I have seen Vesuvius since, but it was a mere12 toy, a child’s volcano, a soup-kettle, compared to this. Mount Vesuvius is a shapely cone13 thirty-six hundred feet high; its crater an inverted14 cone only three hundred feet deep, and not more than a thousand feet in diameter, if as much as that; its fires meagre, modest, and docile15.—But here was a vast, perpendicular16, walled cellar, nine hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others, level- floored, and ten miles in circumference17! Here was a yawning pit upon whose floor the armies of Russia could camp, and have room to spare.
Perched upon the edge of the crater, at the opposite end from where we stood, was a small look-out house—say three miles away. It assisted us, by comparison, to comprehend and appreciate the great depth of the basin—it looked like a tiny martin-box clinging at the eaves of a cathedral. After some little time spent in resting and looking and ciphering, we hurried on to the hotel.
By the path it is half a mile from the Volcano House to the lookout19- house. After a hearty20 supper we waited until it was thoroughly21 dark and then started to the crater. The first glance in that direction revealed a scene of wild beauty. There was a heavy fog over the crater and it was splendidly illuminated22 by the glare from the fires below. The illumination was two miles wide and a mile high, perhaps; and if you ever, on a dark night and at a distance beheld23 the light from thirty or forty blocks of distant buildings all on fire at once, reflected strongly against over-hanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what this looked like.
A colossal24 column of cloud towered to a great height in the air immediately above the crater, and the outer swell25 of every one of its vast folds was dyed with a rich crimson26 luster27, which was subdued28 to a pale rose tint29 in the depressions between. It glowed like a muffled30 torch and stretched upward to a dizzy height toward the zenith. I thought it just possible that its like had not been seen since the children of Israel wandered on their long march through the desert so many centuries ago over a path illuminated by the mysterious “pillar of fire.” And I was sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the majestic31 “pillar of fire” was like, which almost amounted to a revelation.
Arrived at the little thatched lookout house, we rested our elbows on the railing in front and looked abroad over the wide crater and down over the sheer precipice32 at the seething33 fires beneath us. The view was a startling improvement on my daylight experience. I turned to see the effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of men I almost ever saw. In the strong light every countenance34 glowed like red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused35 with crimson and shaded rearward into dingy36, shapeless obscurity! The place below looked like the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up on a furlough.
I turned my eyes upon the volcano again. The “cellar” was tolerably well lighted up. For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated; beyond these limits the mists hung down their gauzy curtains and cast a deceptive37 gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote corners of the crater seem countless38 leagues removed—made them seem like the camp-fires of a great army far away. Here was room for the imagination to work! You could imagine those lights the width of a continent away—and that hidden under the intervening darkness were hills, and winding39 rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert—and even then the tremendous vista40 stretched on, and on, and on!—to the fires and far beyond! You could not compass it—it was the idea of eternity41 made tangible—and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye!
The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently42 smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked44 and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it—imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled46 net- work of angry fire!
Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter, broken in the dark crust, and in them the melted lava—the color a dazzling white just tinged47 with yellow—was boiling and surging furiously; and from these holes branched numberless bright torrents48 in many directions, like the spokes49 of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while and then swept round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession of sharp worm-fence angles, which looked precisely50 like the fiercest jagged lightning. These streams met other streams, and they mingled52 with and crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction, like skate tracks on a popular skating ground. Sometimes streams twenty or thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing—and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down small, steep hills and were genuine cataracts53 of fire, white at their source, but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with alternate lines of black and gold. Every now and then masses of the dark crust broke away and floated slowly down these streams like rafts down a river. Occasionally the molten lava flowing under the superincumbent crust broke through—split a dazzling streak43, from five hundred to a thousand feet long, like a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre after acre of the cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edgewise like cakes of ice when a great river breaks up, plunged54 downward and were swallowed in the crimson cauldron. Then the wide expanse of the “thaw” maintained a ruddy glow for a while, but shortly cooled and became black and level again. During a “thaw,” every dismembered cake was marked by a glittering white border which was superbly shaded inward by aurora55 borealis rays, which were a flaming yellow where they joined the white border, and from thence toward their points tapered56 into glowing crimson, then into a rich, pale carmine57, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a moment and then dimmed and turned black. Some of the streams preferred to mingle51 together in a tangle45 of fantastic circles, and then they looked something like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship’s deck when she has just taken in sail and dropped anchor—provided one can imagine those ropes on fire.
Through the glasses, the little fountains scattered58 about looked very beautiful. They boiled, and coughed, and spluttered, and discharged sprays of stringy red fire—of about the consistency59 of mush, for instance—from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along with a shower of brilliant white sparks—a quaint60 and unnatural61 mingling62 of gouts of blood and snow-flakes!
We had circles and serpents and streaks63 of lightning all twined and wreathed and tied together, without a break throughout an area more than a mile square (that amount of ground was covered, though it was not strictly64 “square”), and it was with a feeling of placid65 exultation66 that we reflected that many years had elapsed since any visitor had seen such a splendid display—since any visitor had seen anything more than the now snubbed and insignificant67 “North” and “South” lakes in action. We had been reading old files of Hawaiian newspapers and the “Record Book” at the Volcano House, and were posted.
I could see the North Lake lying out on the black floor away off in the outer edge of our panorama68, and knitted to it by a web-work of lava streams. In its individual capacity it looked very little more respectable than a schoolhouse on fire. True, it was about nine hundred feet long and two or three hundred wide, but then, under the present circumstances, it necessarily appeared rather insignificant, and besides it was so distant from us.
I forgot to say that the noise made by the bubbling lava is not great, heard as we heard it from our lofty perch18. It makes three distinct sounds—a rushing, a hissing69, and a coughing or puffing70 sound; and if you stand on the brink71 and close your eyes it is no trick at all to imagine that you are sweeping72 down a river on a large low-pressure steamer, and that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers73, the puffing from her escape-pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft74 her wheels. The smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.
We left the lookout house at ten o’clock in a half cooked condition, because of the heat from Pele’s furnaces, and wrapping up in blankets, for the night was cold, we returned to our Hotel.
点击收听单词发音
1 schooner | |
n.纵帆船 | |
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2 vessel | |
n.船舶;容器,器皿;管,导管,血管 | |
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3 bent | |
n.爱好,癖好;adj.弯的;决心的,一心的 | |
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4 elevation | |
n.高度;海拔;高地;上升;提高 | |
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5 lava | |
n.熔岩,火山岩 | |
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6 climax | |
n.顶点;高潮;v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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7 ragged | |
adj.衣衫褴褛的,粗糙的,刺耳的 | |
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8 fissures | |
n.狭长裂缝或裂隙( fissure的名词复数 );裂伤;分歧;分裂v.裂开( fissure的第三人称单数 ) | |
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9 vapor | |
n.蒸汽,雾气 | |
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10 bowels | |
n.肠,内脏,内部;肠( bowel的名词复数 );内部,最深处 | |
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11 crater | |
n.火山口,弹坑 | |
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12 mere | |
adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过 | |
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13 cone | |
n.圆锥体,圆锥形东西,球果 | |
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14 inverted | |
adj.反向的,倒转的v.使倒置,使反转( invert的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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15 docile | |
adj.驯服的,易控制的,容易教的 | |
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16 perpendicular | |
adj.垂直的,直立的;n.垂直线,垂直的位置 | |
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17 circumference | |
n.圆周,周长,圆周线 | |
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18 perch | |
n.栖木,高位,杆;v.栖息,就位,位于 | |
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19 lookout | |
n.注意,前途,瞭望台 | |
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20 hearty | |
adj.热情友好的;衷心的;尽情的,纵情的 | |
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21 thoroughly | |
adv.完全地,彻底地,十足地 | |
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22 illuminated | |
adj.被照明的;受启迪的 | |
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23 beheld | |
v.看,注视( behold的过去式和过去分词 );瞧;看呀;(叙述中用于引出某人意外的出现)哎哟 | |
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24 colossal | |
adj.异常的,庞大的 | |
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25 swell | |
vi.膨胀,肿胀;增长,增强 | |
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26 crimson | |
n./adj.深(绯)红色(的);vi.脸变绯红色 | |
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27 luster | |
n.光辉;光泽,光亮;荣誉 | |
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28 subdued | |
adj. 屈服的,柔和的,减弱的 动词subdue的过去式和过去分词 | |
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29 tint | |
n.淡色,浅色;染发剂;vt.着以淡淡的颜色 | |
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30 muffled | |
adj.(声音)被隔的;听不太清的;(衣服)裹严的;蒙住的v.压抑,捂住( muffle的过去式和过去分词 );用厚厚的衣帽包着(自己) | |
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31 majestic | |
adj.雄伟的,壮丽的,庄严的,威严的,崇高的 | |
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32 precipice | |
n.悬崖,危急的处境 | |
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33 seething | |
沸腾的,火热的 | |
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34 countenance | |
n.脸色,面容;面部表情;vt.支持,赞同 | |
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35 suffused | |
v.(指颜色、水气等)弥漫于,布满( suffuse的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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36 dingy | |
adj.昏暗的,肮脏的 | |
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37 deceptive | |
adj.骗人的,造成假象的,靠不住的 | |
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38 countless | |
adj.无数的,多得不计其数的 | |
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39 winding | |
n.绕,缠,绕组,线圈 | |
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40 vista | |
n.远景,深景,展望,回想 | |
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41 eternity | |
n.不朽,来世;永恒,无穷 | |
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42 apparently | |
adv.显然地;表面上,似乎 | |
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43 streak | |
n.条理,斑纹,倾向,少许,痕迹;v.加条纹,变成条纹,奔驰,快速移动 | |
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44 streaked | |
adj.有条斑纹的,不安的v.快速移动( streak的过去式和过去分词 );使布满条纹 | |
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45 tangle | |
n.纠缠;缠结;混乱;v.(使)缠绕;变乱 | |
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46 tangled | |
adj. 纠缠的,紊乱的 动词tangle的过去式和过去分词 | |
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47 tinged | |
v.(使)发丁丁声( ting的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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48 torrents | |
n.倾注;奔流( torrent的名词复数 );急流;爆发;连续不断 | |
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49 spokes | |
n.(车轮的)辐条( spoke的名词复数 );轮辐;破坏某人的计划;阻挠某人的行动 | |
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50 precisely | |
adv.恰好,正好,精确地,细致地 | |
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51 mingle | |
vt.使混合,使相混;vi.混合起来;相交往 | |
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52 mingled | |
混合,混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 ); 混进,与…交往[联系] | |
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53 cataracts | |
n.大瀑布( cataract的名词复数 );白内障 | |
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54 plunged | |
v.颠簸( plunge的过去式和过去分词 );暴跌;骤降;突降 | |
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55 aurora | |
n.极光 | |
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56 tapered | |
adj. 锥形的,尖削的,楔形的,渐缩的,斜的 动词taper的过去式和过去分词 | |
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57 carmine | |
n.深红色,洋红色 | |
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58 scattered | |
adj.分散的,稀疏的;散步的;疏疏落落的 | |
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59 consistency | |
n.一贯性,前后一致,稳定性;(液体的)浓度 | |
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60 quaint | |
adj.古雅的,离奇有趣的,奇怪的 | |
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61 unnatural | |
adj.不自然的;反常的 | |
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62 mingling | |
adj.混合的 | |
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63 streaks | |
n.(与周围有所不同的)条纹( streak的名词复数 );(通常指不好的)特征(倾向);(不断经历成功或失败的)一段时期v.快速移动( streak的第三人称单数 );使布满条纹 | |
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64 strictly | |
adv.严厉地,严格地;严密地 | |
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65 placid | |
adj.安静的,平和的 | |
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66 exultation | |
n.狂喜,得意 | |
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67 insignificant | |
adj.无关紧要的,可忽略的,无意义的 | |
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68 panorama | |
n.全景,全景画,全景摄影,全景照片[装置] | |
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69 hissing | |
n. 发嘶嘶声, 蔑视 动词hiss的现在分词形式 | |
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70 puffing | |
v.使喷出( puff的现在分词 );喷着汽(或烟)移动;吹嘘;吹捧 | |
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71 brink | |
n.(悬崖、河流等的)边缘,边沿 | |
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72 sweeping | |
adj.范围广大的,一扫无遗的 | |
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73 boilers | |
锅炉,烧水器,水壶( boiler的名词复数 ) | |
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74 abaft | |
prep.在…之后;adv.在船尾,向船尾 | |
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