The Kluchefskoi is one of the highest as well as one of the most uninterruptedly active volcanoes in all the great volcanic chain of the North Pacific. Since the seventeenth century very few years have elapsed without an eruption of greater or less violence, and even now, at irregular intervals of a few months, it bursts into flame and scatters ashes over the whole width of the peninsula and on both seas. The snow in winter is frequently so covered with ashes for twenty-five miles around Kluchei that travel upon sledges becomes almost impossible. Many years ago, according to the accounts of the natives, there was an eruption of terrible magnificence. It began in the middle of a clear, dark winter's night, with loud thunderings and tremblings of the earth, which startled the inhabitants of Kluchei from their sleep and brought them in affright to their doors. Far up in the dark winter's sky, 16,000 feet above their heads, blazed a column of lurid flame from the crater, crowned by a great volume of fire-lighted vapour. Amid loud rumblings, and dull reverberations from the interior, the molten lava began to flow in broad fiery rivers down the snow-covered mountain side, until for half the distance to its base it was one glowing mass of fire which lighted, up the villages of Kristi, Kazerefski, and Kluchei like the sun, and illuminated the whole country within a radius of twenty-five miles. This eruption is said to have scattered ashes over the peninsula for three hundred versts to a depth of an inch and a half. The lava has never yet descended much, if any, below the snow line; but I see no reason why it may not at some future time overwhelm the settlement of Kluchei and fill the channel of the Kamchatka River with a fiery flood. The volcano, so far as I know, has never been ascended, and its reported height, 16,500 feet, is probably the approximative estimate of some Russian officer. It is certainly, however, the highest peak of the Kamchatkan peninsula, and is more likely to exceed 16,000 feet than fall below it. We felt a strong temptation to try to scale its smooth snowy sides and peer over into its smoking crater; but it would have been folly to make the attempt without two or three weeks' training, and we had not the time to spare. The mountain is nearly a perfect cone, and from the village of Kluchei it is so deceitfully foreshortened that the last 3,000 feet appear to be absolutely perpendicular. There is another volcano whose name, if it have any, I could not ascertain, standing a short distance south-east of the Kluchefskoi, and connected with it by an irregular broken ridge. It does not approach the latter in height, but it seems to draw its fiery supplies from the same source, and is constantly puffing out black vapour, which an east wind drives in great clouds across the white sides of Kluchefskoi until it is sometimes almost hidden from sight.