But even this shock passed off without doing any material mischief, and I was beginning to think the worst was over when one of the servants drew my attention to the great reservoir.  It smoked and though there was no wind the water was white with foam and running over the banks.

This went on several minutes, and then the water, as if yielding to some irresistible force, left the sides, and there shot out of it a gigantic jet nearly as thick as the crater was wide and hundreds of feet high.  It broke in the form of a rose and fell in a fine spray, which the setting sun hued with all the colors of the rainbow.

It was the most splendid sight I had ever seen and the most portentous—­for I knew that the crater had become active, and remembering how long it had taken to fill I feared the worst.

The jet went on rising and falling for nearly an hour, but as the mass of the water returned to the crater, very little going over the sides, no great harm was done.

“Thank Heaven for the respite!” exclaimed Angela, who had been clinging to me all the time, trembling yet courageous.  “Don’t you think the danger is now past, my Nigel?”

“For us, it may be.  But if the crater has really become active.  I fear that our poor people at San Cristobal will be in very great danger indeed.”

“No!  God alone—­Hearken!”

A muffled peal of thunder which seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth, followed by a detonation like the discharge of an army’s artillery, and the sides of the crater opened, and with a wild roar the pent-up torrent burst forth, and leaping into the lake, rolled, a mighty avalanche of water, toward the doomed oasis.

We looked at each other in speechless dismay.  Nothing could resist that terrible flood; it would sweep everything before it, for, though its violence might be lessened before it reached the sea, only the few who happened to be near the coast could escape destruction.

Nobody spoke; the roar of the cataract deafened us, the awfulness of the catastrophe made us dumb.  We were as if stunned, and I was conscious of nothing save a sickening sense of helplessness and despair.

For an hour we stood watching the outpouring of the water.  In that hour Quipai was destroyed and its people perished.

As the blood-red sun sank into the bosom of the broad Pacific, a great cloud of smoke and steam, mingled with stones and ashes, was puffed out of the crater and a stream of fiery lava, bursting from the breach in the side of the mountain, followed in the wake of the water.

The uproar was terrific; explosion succeeded explosion; great stones hurled through the air and fell back into the crater with a din like discharges of musketry, and whenever there came a lull we could hear the hissing of the water as it met the lava.

We remained in the garden the night through.  Nobody thought of going indoors; but after a while we became so weary with watching and overwrought with excitement that, despite the danger and the noise we could not keep our eyes open.  Before the southern cross began to bend we were all asleep, Angela and I wrapped in our cobijas, the others on the turf and under the trees.