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There came an awful burst of flame from Mount Hood. Burning cinders and scoria lit up the eastern horizon like a fountain of fire. Then down from the great canyon of the Columbia, from the heart of the Cascade Range, broke a mighty thundering sound, as if half a mountain had fallen. Drowning for a moment the roar of the volcano, the deep echo rolled from crag to crag, from hill to hill.
Nay, they had but cutlasses sad old scythes enough he a blunderbuss, which by its blind scatterings of all sorts of boulders, clinkers, and other scoria would annihilate all four mutineers, like four pigeons at one shot.
Some twelve or fifteen miles farther east, in another volcanic cone, a rough crater is found, surrounded by piles of cinders and angular fragments of lava. In the walls of this crater many caves are found, and here again a village was established, the caves in the scoria being utilized as habitations of men.
In texture they may be stony, glassy, resin-like, vesicular or cellular and light in weight, as in the case of pumice or scoria. The steam and other gases rising through liquid lava are apt to produce bubbles, yielding a surface froth or foam. This froth varies greatly in character according to the nature of the material from which it is formed.
The irregular heaps of scoria that have accumulated in the vicinity of the iron works give the place an illusive air of antiquity; bit it is neither ancient nor picturesque.
In the majority of cases the lavas consist of a mass of crystals floating in a liquid magma, and the distension of such a mass by the escape of steam from its midst gives rise to the formation of the rough cindery-looking material to which the name of "scoria" is applied.
But though these remains of charcoal and scoria are not ancient, yet the little rill does ooze from the plateau on which I believe Marius raised the pyre. It is exactly opposite his monument, between his position and the Panis Annonae, whence swept down Marcellus with his cavalry. It was the site at once of the camp and of the pyre.
The ground plan shows the usual formless heaps of stones and pebbles, with the bases of squares and oblongs, regular and irregular, large and small. There were no signs of wells or aqueducts; and the few furnaces were betrayed only by ashen heaps, thin scatters of scoria, and bits of flux dark carbonate of lime.
Some of the interior valleys are strewed with scoria and broken stones, evidently of volcanic origin; the surrounding rocks bear the like character, and vestiges of extinguished craters are to be seen on the elevated heights.
Then the stream of molten matter began to pour into the great ladle, a huge eight-foot pot swung on tilting trunnions and mounted on a skeleton flat-car; and for Gordon, standing at the corner of the ore shed with his back to the slag drawers, the red glow picked out the man scrambling up the miniature mountain of cooled scoria, this man and another man running swiftly to overtake him.
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