“There was enough of mystery connected with the wonderful experiments going on before our eyes, to give ample employment to fancy and philosophy, and materially to enhance the sublimity of the fearful scene. For it might be asked, how can such an immense mass of rocks and earth be kept incessantly in a state of fusion without fuel or combustion? Or by what process could such solid masses be fused at all, in accordance with any mode of generating heat with which we are acquainted? If there be combustion in the crater adequate to the melting of such vast masses of substances so hard, rocky and earthy, why is there an accumulation and increase of the general mass, so that millions of cubic fathoms are, from time to time, added to the solid contents of the mountain? But if the bowels of the mountain are supposed to be melted by intense heat in some way generated, could they be heaved up by the expansion of steam or gas, while an orifice equal to three or four square miles, like that of Kilauea, or the terminal crater on the same mountain, is kept open; for steam and gas might be supposed to pass through the fluid masses and escape, instead of raising them from a depth, just as steam issues from the bottom of a boiling caldron, without materially elevating the surface of its contents. “But if with one class of geologists, we suppose the interior of the earth to be in a molten and fluid state, as perhaps originally created, and that Kilauea and other volcanoes are but the openings and safety-valves of that subterranean, fiery, central ocean of red or white-hot matter, then we have here no faint illustration of the bold imagery used by the sacred writers, and of their phraseology, which to some seems hyperbolical and even paradoxical, as when they speak of the ‘bottomless pit,’ the ‘fire that is not quenched,’ ‘the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone,’ ‘the smoke of their torment which ascendeth up forever and ever.’ If such a vast mass of fiery fluid constitutes the main portion of the interior of the earth, it is literally ‘bottomless;’ and the opened surface, like that of Kilauea, may be strictly called a ‘lake of fire;’ and as sulphur and particles of the sulphuret of iron are present, it may well be called ‘a lake that burns with fire and brimstone.’