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Then a coronet of flame encircled the crater; masses of red rock, pumice, and magnetic stones were flung out with tremendous violence to an incredible distance, and in such continuous multitudes as to resemble a swarm of bees clustering over the mountain. One boulder of pumice six feet in circumference was pitched twenty miies away; another of magnetic iron fell at a distance of fifteen.
The floating pumice reached the harbor of St. Paul on the 22nd of March, 1884, after having made a voyage of some two hundred and sixty days at a rate of six-tenths of a mile an hour.
These, as I define them, were the mere scoriae and pumice wreck of a steady central lava-flood, which truly was volcanic and explosive to a strange degree, but did rest as few others on the grand fire-depths of the world.
Slates cracked underfoot, flung down from the roofs by the wind, and the jackdaws croaked in answer to each other across the silent park. Durtal came out on a terrace overlooking the city, and he rested his elbows on a parapet of grey time-eaten stone, as dry as pumice and patterned with orange and sulphur-coloured lichens.
She knew now what had become of Bompard, and with lips dry as pumice stone she began to climb till she reached the point where she had sat that morning. If the mud had taken Bompard, had he cried out? If so, La Touche would have heard his cries, for the caves were not so far from the Lizard rocks.
ALABASTER. The proper way of cleaning elegant chimney pieces, or other articles made of alabaster, is to reduce some pumice stone to a very fine powder, and mix it up with verjuice. Let it stand two hours, then dip into it a sponge, and rub the alabaster with it: wash it with fresh water and a linen cloth, and dry it with clean linen rags.
The effect on "Faust," or on any high passionate poem, of attempting to put it into prose, is akin to what would be the effect on an exquisite bas-relief of reducing its projection one half by a persevering application of pumice. The translator of a poem has a much higher and subtler duty than just to take the words and through them attempt passively to render the page into his own language.
A short walk, however, along the track, which was more than ankle-deep in dust, brought them under the sheltering sides of Rakata, up which they soon scrambled to the mouth of their cave. Here all was found as they had left it, save that the entrance was knee-deep in pumice dust.
In the eruption of 1812 this mountain sent forth clouds of pumice, scoriæ and ashes, some of which were carried by an upper counter current to Barbados, one hundred miles to the eastward, covering the surface with volcanic dust to a depth of several inches. An excellent, and perhaps the most recent, map of this kind is that given by Professor Prestwich in his Geology, vol. i. p. 216.
Perhaps it is due to the wine grown on these scorching slopes. If geologists are right, we are sitting at this moment on the crater of a volcano " "Dear me! That might be rather awkward. I suppose this pumice is very light?" "Light as foam. But who can believe it? The bearers move within a few feet of us, and yet it resembles the most ponderous limestone or granite.
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