At night and early morning, it often rises up straight and leaves the whole outline clear.
It is only when actually gazing on an active volcano that one can fully realize its awfulness and grandeur.

Whence comes that inexhaustible fire whose dense and sulphurous smoke forever issues from this bare and desolate peak?
Whence the mighty forces that produced that peak, and still from time to time exhibit themselves in the earthquakes that always occur in the vicinity of volcanic vents?
The knowledge from childhood of the fact that volcanoes and earthquakes exist, has taken away somewhat of the strange and exceptional character that really belongs to them.

The inhabitant of most parts of northern Europe sees in the earth the emblem of stability and repose.

His whole life-experience, and that of all his age and generation, teaches him that the earth is solid and firm, that its massive rocks may contain water in abundance, but never fire; and these essential characteristics of the earth are manifest in every mountain his country contains.

A volcano is a fact opposed to all this mass of experience, a fact of so awful a character that, if it were the rule instead of the exception, it would make the earth uninhabitable a fact so strange and unaccountable that we may be sure it would not be believed on any human testimony, if presented to us now for the first time, as a natural phenomenon happening in a distant country.
The summit of the small island is composed of a highly crystalline basalt; lower down I found a hard, stratified slatey sandstone, while on the beach are huge blocks of lava, and scattered masses of white coralline limestone.