After watching the sinking, which was followed by puffs of dust and smoke and some avalanche noise, we took a car to the pit at once. And when we got there in the early morning hours we found the pit enlarged to 2,000 feet across, with the pattern of the lava lakes still apparent at the bottom, indicating that the entire cylinder had lowered as a unit to a depth of about 700 feet. Red hot avalanches were tumbling inward with a roar, from the veneer of lava plastered on the wall. By the forenoon of that day the liquid lava started to pour up and inward as a ring of bubbling fountains all around the edges. What this ring represented was the wall crack between the subsided cylinder of semisolid lava, now pushing upward, and the funnel of rock wall outside. This V-shaped filling grew wider as the uprising progressed, and so the ring lake became wider, while the top of the harder column became a ring of crags and the space inside became a quiet lava puddle supplied by inflow from the ring lake. The whole column of ring crags with the lagoon inside and the brilliantly fountaining lake outside rose with unheard of rapidity during the next three weeks. In mid-December, I took Mrs. Jaggar and a woman friend down to inspect this amazing corolla, or lily, of hard crags which had blossomed up in less than a month, so that the outer ring of boiling fluid was less than a hundred feet below us. We stood at the rift in the Kilauea floor which heads toward the southwest cliff, and suddenly we felt slight earthquakes and saw the face of that cliff crumbling in a visible tumble of rocks. The mountain was quietly breaking open athwart the Kilauea caldera floor, and while we watched we saw forty or fifty low lava fountains in a straight line burst up along a floor crack between us and the cliff. Remember that this crack traversed the downslope between Halemaumau edge and Kilauea wall. Looking back at the ring lake, we saw it beginning to lower and leave a shoreline of black plastering spatter. When we looked into the rift crack at our feet, only one or two feet gaping open, the liquid lava showed about twenty feet down. We were standing on the side of the crack away from the motor car terminus, and floods of lava on the Kilauea floor were spreading right and left from the straight line of vents between us and Kilauea wall. We had to get away from there pronto, as no one could tell what ground might erupt between us and our car. I carefully instructed our friend to be deliberate and step across the fissure; but the girl felt sure that crossing a red hot crack called for a leap. She stepped on a loose slab at the edge of the narrow chasm and slipped into the crack, where she was wedged until we pulled her out. We then stepped across the fissure, for the live lava was far below, and made our way back to the car without further trouble.