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We noted much good timber standing on heavy soil, and on the 14th passed a curious hump-like hill, cut-faced, with a reddish and yellow cinder-like look, as if it had been calcined by underlying fires. Near it was an exposure of deep coloured ochre, and, farther on, enormous black cut-banks, also suggestive of coal.
Mud Volcanoes, Geysers, and Hot Springs. Our usual impression of a volcano is indicated in the title of "burning mountain," so often employed, a great fire-spouting cone of volcanic debris, from which steam, lava, rock-masses, cinder-like fragments, and dust, often of extreme fineness, are flung high into the air or flow in river-like torrents of molten rock.
I recalled how I had borne down on Ovide soon after he had put the bird for the first time into the blazing oven; how, in deference to my fears, he had taken it out and stood it on the shelf when its skin, of course, could only have been scorched where it had remained over an hour while he was superintending the construction and cooking of the pudding; and, finally, how the prevaricating fellow whom I knew understood little more about cooking than I did must have concluded, from the cinder-like appearance of the skin when he took it out of the oven the second time, after another twenty minutes' scorching, that it was cooked to the very marrow.
This volcanic peak is of much greater magnitude. The crater opens to the eastward. On the south many stone dwellings have been built of the basaltic and cinder-like rooks. Between the ridge on the south and another on the northwest there is a low saddle in which other buildings have been erected, and in which a great plaza was found, much like the one previously described.
Glowing at first as a white-hot liquid, the lava soon cools at the surface to red and then to black; cinder-like scoriaceous masses form on its surface and in front of the slowly-advancing mass; clouds of steam and other vapor rise from it, and little cones are thrown up from its surface; but many years may elapse before the mass is cooled through.
At last we came to the Wadi Samluf, and I begged that we might stop and have a camel fetched for water. I had to be dragged from my camel, and laid in the cinder-like sand till the tent was pitched, for, as my malarial fever was constant, and I had no tertian intervals, I lost my strength completely.
"As the morning dawned, the shower discontinued, a few laggards fell in scattering confusion over the prostrate city, and the sun climbing the eastern sky sent its peaceful reassuring light upon a cairn-like heap of desolation. The chilled surface of the fallen meteorites were broken up by areas of glowing cinder-like surfaces.
A perfectly smooth grassy plain, about a league square, and shaped like a horse-shoe, opened before us, encompassed by bare cinder-like hills, that rose round red, black, and yellow in a hundred uncouth peaks of ash and slag.
Some water had been spilt on the floor, several muddy buckets straggled here and there, while a heap of moistened plaster was lying in a corner. On the shelves, formerly occupied by fruit and vegetables, were scattered some casts from the antique, covered with a tracery of cinder-like dust which had gradually collected there.
He hurts his foot in a rut two thousand years old in exhumed Pompeii, and presently, when staring at one of the cinder-like corpses unearthed in the next square, conceives the idea that maybe it is the remains of the ancient Street Commissioner, and straightway his horror softens down to a sort of chirpy contentment with the condition of things.
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