Beyond the town we struck into the forest, and began to ascend one of the slopes or spurs of the volcano of Masaya. Occasional openings among the trees enabled us to catch glimpses of lake, plain, and mountain, more extended even, and more beautiful than those which we had witnessed in the morning, from the heights beyond Masaya. The road passed over fields of disintegrating pumice and lava-beds ages old, and now covered with accumulated soil and a thick forest. At the distance of about a league, however, we came to what is called the “_mal pais_” literally, the _bad country_. It was an immense field of lava, which at the last eruption of Masaya had flowed down from the volcano, for a distance of fifteen or twenty miles, in the direction of the lakes. The road crossed it on the summit of a ridge running transversely to the lava current, where the field was narrow, but spreading out on both sides to a great distance. It looked like a vast plain of cast iron, newly cooled, black and forbidding. In places it was rolled up in frowning masses, elsewhere piled one flake on the other, like the ice in the spring time, upon the shores and low islands, or in the narrow channels of our rivers. An ocean of ink, suddenly congealed during a storm, if the imagination of the reader can picture it, would better illustrate its appearance than anything else which occurs to me at this moment. Here and there great, ragged masses, fifty or a hundred feet square, had been turned completely over by the current as it flowed beneath, exhibiting upon the exposed surface a regularly striated appearance, like the curling fibre of the oak or maple. I dismounted and scrambled out amongst the _crinkling_ fragments, but did not go far, as the sharp edges and points cut through my boots like knives. At one place I observed where the half-cooled lava had wrapped itself, layer on layer, around a large tree, which, subsequently burning out or decaying, had left a perfect cast of its trunk and principal branches, so accurate that the very roughness of the bark could still be traced. But what struck me with most surprise was the circumstance that the flood of lava had flowed over the narrow ridge where I was standing, and that a depression existed between me and the volcano whence the molten matter had come. It was clear enough that the popular adage and axiom about the indisposition of water to flow up hill, does not always apply to lava. The explanation of the phenomenon may perhaps be found in the fact that the surface of the lava cooling, is thrown off in fragments, building walls on either side, between which the lava current continues to flow, until rising high, and the vertical pressure becoming great, it breaks through the barrier, and discharges itself laterally. Or, the intermediate valley being filled by the melted substance with a rapidity which would not admit of its finding its level at once, it is easy to