Then came, in the later months of 1921, a sinking away and recovery of the lava. In 1922 came a sinking again, with the lava breaking out in the Chain of Craters of the eastern rift, as though it had been blocked by freezing in the southwest rift and was forced over to split open the old cracks of the mountain to the east. This was confirmed in 1923 by another outbreak in the forest adjacent to the sixth crater, Makaopuhi, which with Napau pit beyond, had been the scene of the 1922 outflows. This action was all extended in April 1924 to the shoreline end of the eastern rift, thirty miles away from Halemaumau, when the Kapoho country cracked open with many earthquakes, and a block of the mountain settled beneath sea level. Coconut palms at the beach were left in a lagoon of sea water eight feet deep. Seventy-five earthquakes in a day frightened away Filipino plantation laborers; railway and roads were ruptured, with new cliffs forming nine feet high; and all of this followed a monumental sinking of Halemaumau bottom, from a vast sea of lava to a tumble of debris in two months. It was evident that between 1920 and 1924 the fracture of the long curved rift athwart Kilauea cauldron from the Kau Desert to the east point of the island was draining the lava out under the ocean to the east. Forty miles from the shore, the submarine slope is covered by 18,000 feet of water. What is the result? The whole of Kilauea Mountain is charged with groundwater, which trickles warm through the beach at Pohoiki and partly warms ponds near Kapoho. Obviously this groundwater of the southeastern lobe of the island mountain surrounds the shaft of Halemaumau at some undefined depth, and the rising and falling glassy lava in the shaft ordinarily glazes itself with a water-tight skin, and may be thought of as a crusted tube. About this tube the groundwater shows only as the lazy steam of the little vents of the pit margins. On May 10, 1924, came the collapse of the Halemaumau pit walls, introducing an explosive steam eruption such as had not been seen by five generations of Hawaiians. The adventures of this period were glorious ones for the scientists. First should be mentioned the amazing subsidence which occurred suddenly at 2 A.M. November 28, 1919, just as Mrs. Jaggar looked across Kilauea Crater at the outline of crags and lava lakes making a glowing dome where Halemaumau pit should have been. We felt a lot of little earthquakes and saw the dome of lava heapings, with glowing lakes on top, sink slowly and majestically and leave the old familiar glowing pit. For almost the whole of 1919 this had been a dome, with overflows, now here, now there. At ten o’clock only the evening before, old Alec had conducted tourists to the top of the dome, where they looked down at the clover-leaf lakes. If it had started to go down while they were there--and any of us might have been there--it is awesome to think of the inevitable fiery engulfment.