My visitation changed.… I wandered at midnight through a country of mountains. Worn out with fatigue, I lay down upon a rock. I found it heave under me. I heard a thunder-peal. A sudden blaze kindled the sky. Bewildered and stunned, I started to my feet. The mountains were on flame; a hundred mouths poured down torrents of liquid fire; they came shooting in sulfurous cataracts down the chasms. The forests burned before them like a garment—the rocks melted—the rivers flew up in sheets of vapor—the valleys were basins of glowing ore—the clouds of smoke and ashes gathered over my head in a solid vault of gloom, sullenly illuminated by the conflagration below—the land was a cavern of fire. In terror inconceivable, I ran, I bounded, I plunged down declivities, I swam rivers; still the fiery torrents hunted my steps as if they had been commissioned against me alone. I felt them gathering speed on me; when I bounded, the spot from which I sprang was on flame before I alighted on the ground. I climbed a promontory with an effort that exhausted my last nerve. The fatal lava swept round its foot and in another instant must encircle me. I ran along the edge of a precipice that made the brain turn; the fire chased me from pinnacle to pinnacle. I clung to the weeds and trunks of trees on its sides, and, in fear of being dashed to pieces, tremblingly let myself down the wall of perpendicular rock. Breathless and dying at the bottom of the descent, I glanced upward; the flame of the thicket on the brow showed me my pursuer. I saw the rapid swelling of the molten tide. In another moment it plunged through the air in a white column; the valley was instantly an expanse of conflagration—every spot was inundated with the blaze. I flew, with scorching feet, with every sinew of my frame parched and dried of its substance—with my eyes blinded and my lungs burned up by the suffocating fumes that rushed before, around, and above me. At length my limit was reached. The land afforded no further room for flight. I stood on the verge of the ocean. Death was inevitable. I had but the choice. Before me spread the world of waters, sad, dim, fathomless, interminable; behind me, the world of flame. By a last desperate effort, I plunged into the ocean. The indefatigable lava rolled on, mass on mass, like armies rushing to the assault. The billows shrank before the fiery shock, sheets of vapor rolled up; still the eruption rolled on, and the returning billows fought against it. The conflict shook the land; the mountain shore crumbled down; the sands melted and burned vitreous; the atmosphere discharged scalding torrents; the winds, shaken from their balance, raged with the violence of more than tempest. Thunder roared in peals that shook the earth, the ocean, and the heavens. In the midst of all I lived, tossed like a grain of sand in the whirlwind.