It crawls over them all and eats them up.

It shoves down houses; it sets woods on fire, and sends the steam and gas out of the tree-trunks hissing into the air.

And (curiously enough) it does this often without touching the trees themselves.

It flows round the trunks (it did so in a wood in the Sandwich Islands a few years ago), and of course sets them on fire by its heat, till nothing is left of them but blackened posts.

But the moisture which comes out of the poor tree in steam blows so hard against the lava round that it can never touch the tree, and a round hole is left in the middle of the lava where the tree was.