“Coming near to the rim, I fell upon my hands and knees, awe-struck, and crept cautiously to the rocky brink; for with all my natural and acquired courage, I was unwilling at once to walk up to the giddy verge, and look down upon the noisy, fiery gulf beneath my feet. Shortly, however, I was able to stand very near, and gaze upon this wonder of the world, which I wish I could set before my readers, in all its mystery, magnitude and grandeur. It is not a lofty cone, or mountain-top pointing to the heavens, but a vast chasm in the earth, five or six times the depth of Niagara falls, and seven or eight miles in circumference. It is situated on the flank of a vast mountain, which has been gradually piled up by a similar agency during the course of ages. Such is the immense extent and depth of Kilauea, that it would take in, entire, the city of Philadelphia or New York, and make their loftiest spires, viewed from the rim, appear small and low. But neither cities nor meadows, nor water nor vegetation, can be found in this chief of the deep places of the earth, but a lake of lava, some black and indurated, some fiery and flowing, some cooling as a floating bridge over the fathomless molten abyss, seven times hotter than Nebuchadnezzar’s hottest furnace, and some bursting up through this temporary incrustation, rending it here and there, and forming mounds and cones upon it. The immense mass, laboring to escape, pressed against the great crater’s sides, which consist not of a frail ‘Chinese wall,’ built by human hands to resist human strength, but an irregularly elliptical wall of basaltic rocks, extending a thousand feet above the surface of the lava lake, and to unknown depths below. Six hundred feet below, the verge stretches around horizontally, a vast amphitheater gallery of black indurated lava, once fluid but now solid, and on which an army of a hundred thousand men might stand to view the sublime spectacle beneath, around, and above them.