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Now these huge funnels, or pipes, are nothing more or less than extinct volcanic craters. The walls, or casings, of these pipes are chiefly of shale and basalt filled with hard earth, yellow near the surface and bluish deeper down. The latter is called "blue-stuff" and is very prolific in diamonds.
Rising in a volcanic region, amid extinguished craters, and mountains awful with the traces of ancient fires, it makes its way through great plains of lava and sandy deserts, penetrates vast sierras or mountainous chains, broken into romantic and often frightful precipices, and crowned with eternal snows; and at other times, careers through green and smiling meadows, and wide landscapes of Italian grace and beauty.
According to him, the shade of color distinguishing those vast plains known as "seas" is a dark gray dashed with green and brown, a color presented also by a few of the great craters.
In regions where the eruption of volcanic matter has taken place in the open air, and where the surface has never since been subjected to great aqueous denudation, cones and craters constitute the most striking peculiarity of this class of formations.
With the exception of the projecting lips of the craters and the top of a subordinate summit a short distance to the northward, the mountains is solidly capped with ice all around; and it is this ice cap which forms the grand central fountain whence all the twenty glaciers of Rainier flow, radiating in every direction.
Owing to these, and the virtual inaccessibility of a large region behind them, no one can travel round the island by land, and small as it is, very little seems to be known of portions of its area. Kauai has apparently two centres of formation, and its mountains are thickly dotted with craters.
The regularity of the gradual slopes is broken on the eastern side by the Valle del Bove, a vast amphitheater more than three thousand feet in depth, three miles in width, and covering an area of ten square miles. The bottom of the valley is dotted with craters which rise in gigantic steps; and, when Ætna is in a state of eruption, these craters pour forth fiery cascades of lava.
Here also we have evidence of older volcanic cones buried beneath seas of lava subsequently extruded. The absence, or rarity, of volcanic craters or cones of eruption in the neighbourhood of these great sheets has led American geologists to the conclusion that the lavas were in many cases extruded from fissures in the earth's crust rather than from ordinary craters.
Before Rip could reply, the snapper-boats flashed over the cave, circled the asteroid once, and landed on the dark side, close to the bomb craters. The first scout reported. "Santos, sir. I'm fifty yards beyond the stakes where we had the first base. The snapper-boats landed between the first two craters. Men coming out of one boat. I count six.
Mud, battle and frost had so combined to disguise all former roads and tracks, that to decide their whereabouts it was often necessary to follow them forward from behind by means of map and compass. Seen by pale moonlight, these derelict roads, in places pitted with huge craters or flanked by shattered trees, wore a mysterious charm.
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