The Wallibu River received the brunt of the heavy, dry, red hot, gravel of the eruptions, drifted like snow and crusted with wet mud. Water supplied by the river broke its way into the eighty feet of incandescent fill of the valley. Instantly a steam explosion was hurled up in white volutes, and the river dammed its own channel with the stone shower from upblasts. This forced its own waters into fresh hot cinder and so maintained explosive action. One such exploding river sent up a column three quarters of a mile high, indescribably majestic, causing the natives to report new craters. A shower of mud and sand fell on our party. The old road crossing Soufrière mountain was destroyed, the river flats were deeply trenched, and difficult ridges and hollows were encountered at every step. The gulches were deepened into gorges, the slopes above furrowed with a feathery rill drainage pattern. Each spur between gulches was like a very steep roof, with a smooth pathway uphill along the watershed. This made progress easier. Big tree stumps of _Ficus_ jutted ragged through the hardened mud, the branches charred and sharpened by sand blast. A whirl of volcanic sand made an unpleasant stinging shower of dust, and sulfuretted hydrogen smelled of rotten eggs. But near the summit the air was fresh and the sunshine bright. A rain would have made the mud slippery and perilous, for the gulch slopes were practically cliffs. Finally we did come to mud clots, resembling a cattle wallow, knee deep and sticky. Large blocks of rock two feet across lay on the surface, flung-out pieces of the old crater walls; and there were some bombs of new lava. After three hours we assembled at the rim of the old crater, which before the outbreak had been full of a high crater lake. Suddenly we came to an immense chasm almost circular, then the profile of a black precipice falling away 2,000 feet; and up its face we saw a silent steam column purling away in billows. The bottom was a green pool of boiling water, muddied by springs from the wall; and a hundred tails of white steam joined the column on the wall.