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Perdition was certain! All the torments that Baxter described were devouring me, and my soul was sinking, like the soul of Francis Spira, into sulphureous flames, there to howl and be eternally tormented by the malignant mocks and mows of inexorable fiends!
Once or twice, indeed, I was half choked by the swirls of sulphureous and muriatic acid vapour that environed me before I could reach the upper edge. I sat down in a nook, though it was a very hot one, and made a sketch or two of the appearance of the crater.
Then up rushes a volume of thick, white smoke, and we are enveloped as in shrouds. I have no more fear, but the odor, ah! that sulphureous, sickening, deathly odor! Faintness seizes me, the ladder swims before my eyes, I am paralyzed, Death has me, I think! But the very excess of the danger has in it something of reviving power.
Coal was found, it is said, 'though of too sulphureous a kind for use; but deeper diggings would, no doubt, lay bare a superior seam. After a year or two, however, affairs began to look black; Sir John Webbe became cool and then fell out with his manager; and the result was that, about 1769, James Stephen found himself confined for debt in the King's Bench prison.
There was a hot, sulphureous vapor in the air, and showers of white ashes fell, from time to time. We were distant about twelve miles, in a straight line, from the crater; but the air was so clear, even under the shadow of the smoke, that I could distinctly trace the downward movement of the rivers of lava.
South of the ravine, in the plain extending towards the shore of the lake, another sulphureous spring gushes out, less hot and less impregnated with gas. The crevice whence this water issues is six toises higher than the funnel just described. The thermometer did not rise in the crevice above 42 degrees.
The broad leaves of the plantains flapped and whistled, and, bending gracefully, allowed the fierce blast to pass over. Then a great cloud came rolling down; a thick vapour seemed to fill the space; and the air felt hot and dark and heavy. A choking, sulphureous smell rendered the breathing difficult, and for a moment day seemed changed to night.
As if roused by the challenge of an intruder, the sleepy monster seemed suddenly to bestir itself, and then pouring out volumes of sulphureous breath, set out with many an angry snort in pursuit of the rash troubler of its solitude.
The pealing thunder rolled onward, and then, reverbed by the mountains, other thunder seemed to answer from the opposite horizon; while the accumulating clouds, entirely concealing the moon, assumed a red sulphureous tinge, that foretold a violent storm.
These two species of bodies, therefore, the siliceous and the sulphureous, may now be examined, in relation to the causes of their concretion, with a view to determine, what has been the general concreting or consolidating power, which has operated universally in the globe; and particularly to show, it has not been by means of any fluid solution, that strata in general have been consolidated, or that those particular substances have been crystallized and concreted.
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