barren of all vegetation, and dark. At the
mouth of one I found a miserable specimen
of Andromeda hypnoides, and a few plants of
Pyrola minor. Our female guide now took
leave of us, after having given us directions
for our route, which lay almost entirely
among broken lava. We had not proceeded
far, when Egclosen told us that we were
drawing near the crater of a volcano, and recommended
to us to leave our horses, as it
would not be easy to approach it with them,
and walk to the spot. Following this suggestion,
we quitted a somewhat level tract
of fragments of lava, heaped one upon the
other, and came on a gently rising eminence
of no great elevation, but composed of a
more solid mass, cracked, indeed, into innumerable
pieces, but these were still lying
in their original bed, and not at all scattered
about: the surface was tolerably smooth, except
that it was marked with elevated semicircular
lines. The summit of this hillock
was terminated by a still more solid mass of
rock, of nearly a conical shape, all consisting
of calcined matter, which had evidently
been formed from the melted rejectamenta
of a volcano; indeed, this was the
rim or mouth of one, and elevated about ten
or twelve feet from the above-mentioned
lava. On climbing to its top, we found the
edge extremely rugged, sharp, and vitrified,
having an orifice from six to seven feet wide,
and gradually becoming narrower for a few
feet as it descended, then widening again,
and forming a hole, whose depth I was by
no means able to ascertain. That it did not
descend exactly in a vertical direction for
any great length of way, was made evident
by throwing in a stone, which soon struck
upon some projecting ledge or bend in the
pipe. The color of this cone on the outside
was a deep greyish brown, almost inclining
to black, and in some places a full red, considerably
darker than the lava it stood upon,
which appeared to have been exposed to a
less degree of heat. There was no smoke, nor
any smell of sulphur to be perceived ; nor, to
judge from the grass that grew in thick tufts
some way down the crater, had there been any
for a great length of time. The natives, too,
had no tradition of its having thrown out
fire, neither was the place itself known to
many who lived in this quarter of the island.
Sir John Stanley seems to have passed over