The liquid phase took an unusual fountain form, resembling that of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and nine spells of bright incandescent explosive fountaining occurred. The collapse began on March 13; the fountaining occurred during March 20 to 22, with jets of bright liquid lava and flames, 1,000 to 3,000 feet high; and the crater became a lava lake. The flames were occasioned by hydrogen within the lava itself, and perhaps some carbon gases. This liquid fountaining phase was the culmination of explosions, making pumice, with water vapor the gaseous product. Ash fell four feet deep three miles away, and some fell on the Adriatic coast. Both white steam clouds and black ash clouds arose with the fountains, white and black side by side. The net effect was to leave a bowl 1,500 feet in diameter and 800 feet deep, floored with avalanche gravel. This reconstructed the funnel of 1906, and as in 1906, the height of the rim was 4,100 feet after eruption. In other words, the thirty-eight years had filled the vast crater, only to have 1944 engulf and eject the contents, and strew them down the slopes, adding an immense weight to the outer shell of the cone. A hundred million cubic yards of lava was poured out, and 50 million cubic yards of ash now lie on the volcano. Three times as much was carried far away, and the volume of gases was ten times as great. The rock fragments, probably 200 times as great, were engulfed by avalanches. The big achievement of an eruption is to wedge open a mountain, let the internal lava effervesce and go down, admit ground water, and make spectacular fireworks of burning gas and meltings. Release of pressure by splitting open the crust permits a great show of fiery foaming, but no geologist sees the profound accomplishment of lava sinking and flowing away by underground channels. It may flow out along the Mediterranean Sea bottom. At Vesuvius, it may slip through deep cracks in the direction of Sicily. Certainly a periodic adjustment of the big system (Vesuvius-Stromboli-Etna) has taken place deep down in the earth, and the thirty-eight years of accumulation mean a stress by weighting down. The pressure of 100 million tons of stored lava inside a weak cone mountain and ready to effervesce with heat and give up its hydrogen is what science too often forgets.