The next morning the great crater of Kilauea was filled with fog, but it lifted, and the sun shone before noon.  We passed a pleasant forenoon strolling along the tree-fringed brink, looking down eight or nine hundred feet upon its black lava floor, and plucking ohelo berries, which grew there abundantly, a kind of large, red huckleberry that one could eat out of hand, but that one could not get excited over.  They were better in a pie than in the hand.  Their name seemed to go well with the suggestion of the scenes amid which they grew.  Kilauea is a round extinct crater about three miles across and seven or eight hundred feet deep.  It has been the scene of terrific explosions in past ages, but it has now dwindled to the small active crater of Halemaumau, which is sunk near the middle of it like a huge pot, two hundred or more feet deep and a thousand feet across.

In the mid-afternoon a party of eight or ten of us on horseback set out to visit the volcano.  The trail led down the broken and shelving side of the crater, amid trees and bushes, till it struck the floor of lava at the bottom.  In going down I was aware all the time of a beautiful bird-song off on my left, a song almost as sweet as that of our hermit thrush, but of an entirely different order.  I think it was the song of one of the honey-suckers, a red bird with black wings that in flight looked like our scarlet tanager.

Our course took us out over the cracked and contorted lava-beds, where no green thing was growing.  The forms of the lava-flow suggested mailed and writhing dragons, with horrid, gaping mouths and vicious claws.  The lava crunched beneath the horses’ feet like shelly and brittle ice.  At one point we passed over a wide, jagged crack on a bridge.  As we neared the crater, the rocks grew warm, and sulphur and other fumes streaked the air.

When a half-mile from the crater we dismounted, and, leaving our horses in charge of the guide, proceeded on foot over the cracked and heated lava rocks toward the brink of this veritable devil’s caldron.  The sulphur fumes are so suffocating that it can be approached only on the windward side.  The first glance into that fearful pit is all that your imagination can picture it.  You look upon the traditional lake of brimstone and fire, and if devils were to appear skipping about over the surface with pitchforks, turning their victims as the cook turns her frying crullers in the sputtering fat, it would not much astonish you.  This liquid is rather thick and viscid, but it is boiling furiously.  Great masses of it are thrown up forty or fifty feet, and fall with a crash like that of the surf upon the shore.  Livid jets are thrown up many feet high against the sides and drip back, cooling quickly as the lava descends.  We sat or stood upon the brink, at times almost letting our feet hang over the sides, and shielding our faces from the intense heat with paper masks and veils.  It is probably the only place in the world where you can come face to face with the heart of an active volcano.  There are no veils of vapor to hide it from you.  It appears easy enough to cast a stone into the midst of it, but none of us could quite do it.