Perched upon the edge of the crater, at the opposite end from where we stood, was a small look-out house—­say three miles away.  It assisted us, by comparison, to comprehend and appreciate the great depth of the basin —­it looked like a tiny martin-box clinging at the eaves of a cathedral.  After some little time spent in resting and looking and ciphering, we hurried on to the hotel.

By the path it is half a mile from the Volcano House to the lookout-house.  After a hearty supper we waited until it was thoroughly dark and then started to the crater.  The first glance in that direction revealed a scene of wild beauty.  There was a heavy fog over the crater and it was splendidly illuminated by the glare from the fires below.  The illumination was two miles wide and a mile high, perhaps; and if you ever, on a dark night and at a distance beheld the light from thirty or forty blocks of distant buildings all on fire at once, reflected strongly against over-hanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what this looked like.

A colossal column of cloud towered to a great height in the air immediately above the crater, and the outer swell of every one of its vast folds was dyed with a rich crimson luster, which was subdued to a pale rose tint in the depressions between.  It glowed like a muffled torch and stretched upward to a dizzy height toward the zenith.  I thought it just possible that its like had not been seen since the children of Israel wandered on their long march through the desert so many centuries ago over a path illuminated by the mysterious “pillar of fire.”  And I was sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the majestic “pillar of fire” was like, which almost amounted to a revelation.

Arrived at the little thatched lookout house, we rested our elbows on the railing in front and looked abroad over the wide crater and down over the sheer precipice at the seething fires beneath us.  The view was a startling improvement on my daylight experience.  I turned to see the effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of men I almost ever saw.  In the strong light every countenance glowed like red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity!  The place below looked like the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up on a furlough.

I turned my eyes upon the volcano again.  The “cellar” was tolerably well lighted up.  For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated; beyond these limits the mists hung down their gauzy curtains and cast a deceptive gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote corners of the crater seem countless leagues removed—­made them seem like the camp-fires of a great army far away.  Here was room for the imagination to work!  You could imagine those lights the width of a continent away—­and that hidden under the intervening darkness were hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert—­and even then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on, and on!—­to the fires and far beyond!  You could not compass it—­it was the idea of eternity made tangible—­and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye!