“While through the eye, the impressions of grandeur, strong at first, increased till the daylight was gone, the impressions received through the ear, were peculiar, and by no means inconsiderable. The fiercely whizzing sound of gas and steam, rushing with varying force through obstructed apertures in blowing cones, or cooling crusts of lava, and the laboring, wheezing, struggling, as of a living mountain, breathing fire and smoke and sulphurous gas from his lurid nostrils, tossing up molten rocks or detached portions of fluid lava, and breaking up vast indurated masses with varied detonations, all impressively bade us stand in awe. When we reached the verge, or whenever we came from a little distance to look over, these strange sounds increased, as if some intelligent power, with threatening tones and gestures, indignant at our obtrusiveness, were forbidding us to approach. The effect of all this on aboriginal visitors, before the true God was made known to them, may have been to induce or confirm the superstition, that a deity or family of deities dwelt there, and recognized the movements of men, and in various ways expressed anger against them. If my native fellow-travelers had not been cured of their superstition, or had not known me to be opposed to all idolatry, and particularly to the worship of Pele, the goddess whom they once supposed dwelt there, they might naturally have mistaken my almost involuntary prostration, as an act of religious homage to this discarded Hawaiian deity. But the missionaries had set at naught the _tabus_ of this deity, and Kapiolani had openly invaded the same, and descending into this crater had, in a fearless and Christian manner, there acknowledged Jehovah as the only true God, and proclaimed to her countrymen that this was but one of the fires which he has kindled and controls. So that the natives now with me were ready devoutly to acknowledge all this. “When seven years before our visit, Messrs. Ellis, Thurston, Bishop and Goodrich, accompanied by Mr. Harwood, visited this yawning gulf, they said of it: ‘The bottom was filled with lava, and the south-west and northern parts of it were one vast flood of liquid fire, in a state of terrific ebullition, rolling to and fro its fiery surge and flaming billows. Fifty-one craters of various forms and sizes, rose, like so many conical islands from the surface of the burning lake. Twenty-two constantly emitted columns of gray smoke and pyramids of brilliant flame, and many of them at the same time vomited from their ignited mouths, streams of fluid lava, which rolled in blazing torrents down their black, indented sides, into the boiling mass of fire below.’ The surface of this body of lava is subject to unceasing changes from year to year; for ‘deep calleth unto deep’ continually, and the fiery billows of this troubled ocean never rest.