upward in the form of a feathery palm, the gods are propitious, and sunshine will be the order of the day; when it shoots out in a long streak horizontally from the crater, a change is impending; and when the vapoury cloud gathers round the summit and coils rapidly down the sides of the cone, as it does often with singular rapidity, it is time to look out for squalls. For a long distance up the mountain its rugged sides glittered with icicles, which clustered about the enormous masses of trachytic lava which cropped up everywhere around, while the ground was covered in every direction with a thick coating of frost and frozen snow. At a height of 7000 feet the whole aspect of the cone had a very bare and desolate look, and, besides the enormous boulders we encountered, we passed over a steep slope covered with volcanic conglomerate, which was very treacherous and slippery with sheets of ice. Here we had to go on all fours, and even in this way it was very difficult to keep our equilibrium sufficiently to prevent ourselves from rolling down the precipitous slopes below. We could now smell the sulphurous fumes of the crater as the clouds of steam rolled over us while we clambered over the enormous ice-bound rocks in the direction of the yawning chasm. We crawled up a frozen, steep incline on to the hot, quaking edge of the great crater, where a grand and curious sight burst upon the view. We gained the rugged summit of the cone at its highest side, but just as we did so the great cloud of steam rolling up from the enormous basin beneath us swept over us in a dense white cloud, and what with the loud bubbling of the boiling springs, the hissing, screeching sound of the great columns of steam as they burst with terrific force from the rocky vents, the unearthly gurglings of the jets of boiling mud as they shot into the air, and the strong sulphurous fumes that pervaded the atmosphere in every direction, we seemed for once in our lives to be standing on the brink of Hades. Mounting a little to the right along the hot soil that smoked beneath our feet, we gained the very topmost point of the mountain, formed by a broken, rugged peak that fell on the inner side with a precipitous descent into the boiling crater below. We were now on the windward side of the steam-cloud, and at an altitude of 7376 feet above the level of the sea.