The next night was appointed for a visit to the bottom of the crater, for we desired to traverse its floor and see the "North Lake" (of fire) which lay two miles away, toward the further wall.After dark half a dozen of us set out, with lanterns and native guides, and climbed down a crazy, thousand-foot pathway in a crevice fractured in the crater wall, and reached the bottom in safety.
The irruption of the previous evening had spent its force and the floor looked black and cold; but when we ran out upon it we found it hot yet, to the feet, and it was likewise riven with crevices which revealed the underlying fires gleaming vindictively.A neighboring cauldron was threatening to overflow, and this added to the dubiousness of the situation.So the native guides refused to continue the venture, and then every body deserted except a stranger named Marlette.He said he had been in the crater a dozen times in daylight and believed he could find his way through it at night.He thought that a run of three hundred yards would carry us over the hottest part of the floor and leave us our shoe-soles.His pluck gave me back-bone.We took one lantern and instructed the guides to hang the other to the roof of the look-out house to serve as a beacon for us in case we got lost, and then the party started back up the precipice and Marlette and I made our run.
We skipped over the hot floor and over the red crevices with brisk dispatch and reached the cold lava safe but with pretty warm feet.Then we took things leisurely and comfortably, jumping tolerably wide and probably bottomless chasms, and threading our way through picturesque lava upheavals with considerable confidence.When we got fairly away from the cauldrons of boiling fire, we seemed to be in a gloomy desert, and a suffocatingly dark one, surrounded by dim walls that seemed to tower to the sky.The only cheerful objects were the glinting stars high overhead.
By and by Marlette shouted "Stop!" I never stopped quicker in my life.
I asked what the matter was.He said we were out of the path.He said we must not try to go on till we found it again, for we were surrounded with beds of rotten lava through which we could easily break and plunge down a thousand feet.I thought eight hundred would answer for me, and was about to say so when Marlette partly proved his statement by accidentally crushing through and disappearing to his arm-pits.
He got out and we hunted for the path with the lantern.He said there was only one path and that it was but vaguely defined.We could not find it.The lava surface was all alike in the lantern light.But he was an ingenious man.He said it was not the lantern that had informed him that we were out of the path, but his feet.He had noticed a crisp grinding of fine lava-needles under his feet, and some instinct reminded him that in the path these were all worn away.So he put the lantern behind him, and began to search with his boots instead of his eyes.It was good sagacity.The first time his foot touched a surface that did not grind under it he announced that the trail was found again; and after that we kept up a sharp listening for the rasping sound and it always warned us in time.
