m
II
I
which is fifty-one feet in diameter. The
bottom of it was a prodigious body of white
foam, magnificent beyond what the warmest
imagination could picture, and by concealment
rendering more impressive the wonders
it envelopped; but, higher up, amidst the
vast clouds of steam that had burst from the
pipe, the water was at intervals discoverable,
mounting in a compact column, which at a
still greater elevation, where it was full in
view, burst into innumerable long and narrow
streamlets of spray, some of which were
shot to a vast height in the air in a perpendicular
direction, while others were thrown
out from the side, diagonally, to a prodigious
distance *. The excessive transparency of
the body of water, and the brilliancy of the
* Darwin, in his Botanic Garden, vol. i. page 128, has
a few lines upon the Geyser, which are rather more
poetical than correct:
High in the frozen north where Hecla glows,
And melts in torrents his coeval snows •,
O’er isles and oceans sheds a sanguine light,
And shoots red stars amid the ebon night;
When, at his base entombed, with bellowing sound
Fell Geyser roar’d, and, struggling, shook the ground: