It has been known to sink down 400 feet; last December it was overflowing the high banks and sending streams of lava into the great plain by which we approached it; and since I saw it, it has risen to within a few feet of the top of the bank, and has forced a way out at one side, where, in September, 1873, it was flowing out slowly on to the great lava plain which forms the bottom of the main crater.
What, therefore, Madame Pele will show you hereafter is uncertain.

What we saw was this: two large lakes or caldrons, each nearly circular, with the lower shelf or bank, red-hot, from which the molten lava was repelled toward the centre without cessation.

The surface of these lakes was of a lustrous and beautiful gray, and this, which was a cooling and tolerably solid scum, was broken by jagged circles of fire, which appeared of a vivid rose-color in contrast with the gray.

These circles, starting at the red-hot bank or shore, moved more or less rapidly toward the centre, where, at intervals of perhaps a minute, the whole mass of lava suddenly but slowly bulged up, burst the thin crust, and flung aloft a huge, fiery wave, which sometimes shot as high as thirty feet in the air.

Then ensued a turmoil, accompanied with hissing, and occasionally with a dull roar as the gases sought to escape, and spray was flung in every direction; and presently the agitation subsided, to begin again in the same place, or perhaps in another.
Meantime the fiery rings moved forward perpetually toward the centre, a new one re-appearing at the shore before the old was ingulfed; and not unfrequently the mass of lava was so fiercely driven by some force from the bank near which we stood, that it was ten or fifteen feet higher near the centre than at the circumference.