The magnificent spectacle of the lake of lava at Kilauea is indescribable. Charles W. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard University, visited the crater and pronounced it the most wonderful scene he had ever watched. It is a lake of liquid fire one thousand feet across, splashing on its banks with a noise like the waves of the sea. Great high fountains boil up through it, sending quantities of glowing spray over the shore. There are fiery, molten cascades, whirlpools, and rapids, with hissing of gases, rumbling, and blue flames playing through the crevices. It is ever changing, and the record of these changes is being kept from day to day, photographically and otherwise, by the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. Mauna Loa is an active crater, 13,675 feet above sea-level. It is an enormous mountain mass, covering a wide area with its very gentle slopes. This volcano erupts about once every decade. Of the three volcanoes in the Park, Mauna Loa is the most productive of new rock, which it pours out on the surface of the land. Its activities start with outbursts on the summit and culminate after a number of years in a flow which floods the whole country for many months. Perpetual snow crowns Mauna Loa, and ice may be found in cracks even in summer. In the winter-time there is a variety of climate from sea-level to the summit--from the warmth of the tropics to arctic blizzards on the mountain-top. An interesting and somewhat amusing story is told in regard to an eruption of Mauna Loa in 1881. The flow of lava at that time was so heavy that it seriously threatened to wipe out the town of Hilo. When the lava ran down to within a mile of the place, the natives urged their Princess Ruth to go and conjure the goddess of the volcano, Pele, to stop the flow. She went--so the tales goes--with all her retinue, and threw into the crater some berries, a black hen, a white pig, and a bottle of gin, as sacrifices. The lava-flow stopped, and the natives believed their escape due to the odd offering, although some people have expressed the opinion that such a collection of stuff thrown into an active volcano's crater would make the eruption more violent, if it had any effect at all. Mauna Loa forces columns of liquid lava hundreds of feet into the air, and every few years pours forth billions of tons of lava in a few days. There is a wonderful rift-line, from which eight or ten flows poured forth during the last century. These burst out on the slopes of the mountain, not from the summit crater. After the first explosion at the summit, a period of quiet intervenes, and then the rifts open and lava flows down.