But when Professor Young returned, about half an hour later, he found that a very wonderful change had taken place, and that a very remarkable process was actually in progress. "The whole thing had been literally blown to shreds," he says, "by some inconceivable uprush from beneath. In place of the quiet cloud I had [Page 87] left, the air--if I may use the expression--was filled with the flying _débris_, a mass of detached vertical fusi-form fragments, each from ten to thirty seconds (_i. e._, from four thousand five hundred to thirteen thousand five hundred miles) long, by two or three seconds (nine hundred to thirteen hundred and fifty miles) wide--brighter, and closer together where the pillars had formerly stood, and rapidly ascending. When I looked, some of them had already reached a height of nearly four minutes (100,000 miles); and while I watched them they arose with a motion almost perceptible to the eye, until, in ten minutes, the uppermost were more than 200,000 miles above the solar surface. This was ascertained by careful measurements, the mean of three closely accordant determinations giving 210,000 miles as the extreme altitude attained. I am particular in the statement, because, so far as I know, chromatospheric matter (red hydrogen in this case) has never before been observed at any altitude exceeding five minutes, or 135,000 miles. The velocity of ascent, also--one hundred and sixty-seven miles per second--is considerably greater than anything hitherto recorded. * * * As the filaments arose, they gradually faded away like a dissolving cloud, and at a quarter past one only a few filmy wisps, with some brighter streamers low down near the chromatosphere, remained to mark the place. But in the mean while the little 'thunder-head' before alluded to had grown and developed wonderfully into a mass of rolling and ever-changing flame, to speak according to appearances. First, it was crowded down, as it were, along the solar surface; later, it arose almost pyramidally 50,000 miles in height; then [Page 88] its summit was drawn down into long filaments and threads, which were most curiously rolled backward and forward, like the volutes of an Ionic capital, and finally faded away, and by half-past two had vanished like the other. The whole phenomenon suggested most forcibly the idea of an explosion under the great prominence, acting mainly upward, but also in all directions outward; and then, after an interval, followed by a corresponding in-rush."