And as he stood below it (it was not safe to go
up it) smoke rolled up from its top, "rosy pink below," from the glare of
the caldron, and above "faint greenish or blueish silver of indescribable
beauty, from the light of the moon." But more--By good chance, the cone
began to send out, not smoke only, but brilliant burning stones. "Each
explosion," he says, "was like a vast girandole of rockets, with a noise
(such as rockets would make) like the waves on a beach, or the wind
blowing through shrouds. The mountain was trembling the whole time. So
it went on for two hours and more; sometimes eight or ten explosions in a
minute, and more than 1000 stones in each, some as large as two bricks
end to end. The largest ones mostly fell back into the crater; but the
smaller ones being thrown higher, and more acted on by the wind, fell in
immense numbers on the leeward slope of the cone" (of course, making it
bigger and bigger, as I have explained already to you), and of course, as
they were intensely hot and bright, making the cone look as if it too was
red-hot. But it was not so, he says, really. The colour of the stones
was rather "golden, and they spotted the black cone over with their
golden showers, the smaller ones stopping still, the bigger ones rolling
down, and jumping along just like hares." "A wonderful pedestal," he
says, "for the explosion which surmounted it." How high the stones flew
up he could not tell.
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