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And before I dismiss it, I must observe, that we found upon it, as well as upon the beach in and about Endeavour River, bamboos, cocoa-nuts, pumice-stone, and the seeds of plants which are not the produce of this country, and which it is reasonable to suppose are brought from the eastward by the trade-winds.
The filling consisted of some such material as powdered pumice-stone saturated with a solution of potash, and powdered over with fine absorbent charcoal in order to protect against organic irritants and phosgene. These were the familiar one-layer drums.
Like that famous promontory it was originally little more than a barren rock, pumice-stone and lava, which has been improved into a picturesque and habitable place, bristling with one hundred British cannon of heavy calibre.
There Maharaj had his bath, and the boy used to help the mahout to rub him over with a lump of jhama, which is something like pumice-stone, only much harder and rougher, and the old skin rolled off under the friction in astonishing quantities, till the look of dried tree-bark was gone, and the dusty grey had become a shining black.
Winding round the bases of tossed up, fissured hummocks of pahoehoe, leaping from one broken hummock to another, clambering up acclivities so steep that the pack-horse rolled backwards once, and my cat-like mule fell twice, moving cautiously over crusts which rang hollow to the tread; stepping over deep cracks, which, perhaps, led down to the burning fathomless sea, traversing hilly lakes ruptured by earthquakes, and split in cooling into a thousand fissures, painfully toiling up the sides of mounds of scoriae frothed with pumice-stone, and again for miles surmounting rolling surfaces of billowy ropy lava so passed the long day, under the tropic sun, and the deep blue sky.
We might have imagined ourselves scaling the side of some volcano, the fire of which had been extinguished as remotely as that of Monte Cavo, near Rome; but scarcely had we reached the plain covered with pumice-stone, when the landscape changed its aspect, and at every step we met with large blocks of obsidian thrown out by the volcano. Everything here speaks perfect solitude.
Any powder that contains pumice-stone, cuttle-fish bone, charcoal, or gritty substances of any sort, as many unfortunately do, is injurious, because these scratch the enamel of the teeth and give the acids in the mouth a chink through which they may begin to attack the softer dentine underneath the "glaze" of enamel.
The solid piles which contained the cupola were composed of huge blocks of freestone, hewn into squares and triangles, fortified by circles of iron, and firmly cemented by the infusion of lead and quicklime: but the weight of the cupola was diminished by the levity of its substance, which consists either of pumice-stone that floats in the water, or of bricks from the Isle of Rhodes, five times less ponderous than the ordinary sort.
It is an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied.
He referred to a group of men and boys who, stripped to the waist, were bearing aloft immense masses of some argent-coloured rock. "You've guessed my thoughts," replied the bishop. "How on earth are they able to support such a weight? They remind me of Atlas with the world on his shoulders." "It is pumice-stone one of the old industries of the place. They excavate it on the hill-side yonder.
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