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Those flashes of light from the inner fires of the earth, bursting from the fissures of restless volcano Bromo shall ever remain, like some strange glimpse of a new Inferno. Volcanic Merapi, another belching furnace of Java, gave me a picture of a flash-light of flame.

Then came a stiff climb of a mile or more over fantastically shaped hills of lava, the final ascent to the brink of the crater being accomplished by a flight of two hundred and fifty stone steps. The crater of Bromo is shaped like a huge funnel, seven hundred feet deep and nearly half a mile across.

As a result the aroma of their villages is a thing not soon forgotten. The doors of their huts, which have no windows, all face Mount Bromo, where their guardian deity, Dewa Soelan Iloe, is supposed to dwell.

From the center of the Sand Sea rises the extinct crater of Batok, a sugar-loaf cone whose symmetrical slopes are so corrugated by hardened rivulets of lava that they look for all the world like folds of gray-brown cloth. Beyond Batok we could catch a glimpse of Bromo itself, belching skyward great clouds of billowing smoke and steam, while from its crater came a rumble as of distant thunder.

"And it is all because of their awful fear that the gods will be displeased if they give birth to a girl baby!" The second outstanding flash-light of fear comes from Java. In the chapter on Physical Flash-lights I have described the old volcano of Bromo. It is a terrible thing to look into. Great fissures in the earth, belch thunder, sulphur, fire, and lava.

"I say, Andy, what's good when a fellow makes an infernal idiot of himself?" "In your case a little bromo might help." "Got any?" "No, but I can get you some." "Oh, don't bother. When you come back, maybe " "I'll get it," said Andy, shortly. He was late for chapel when he had succeeded in administering a dose of the quieting medicine to Dunk, and this did not add to the pleasures of the occasion.

Gibraltar is like a twenty-dollar gold piece that a man carries in his watch pocket for an emergency, which he never intends to spend until he gets in the tightest place of his life, and it wears out one pocket after another, and some day drops through on to the sidewalk, and a tramp finds it and goes on a bat and gets the worth of his money, and has a good time, if he saves enough to buy a bromo seltzer the next morning after.

"How you going to pour coffee down a man that lays flat on his belly and won't open his mouth?" he inquired, in an injured tone. "Sleep's all he needs, anyway. He'll be all right by morning." The other snorted dissent. "He'll be all right by dark or he'll feel a whole lot worse," he promised grimly. "Dig up some ice. And a good jolt of bromo, if you've got it and a towel or two."

Bloodgood turned on Jack, lifting his eyebrows. "My dear fellow " he began. But Frank put in: "We have no use for bromo seltzer, as none of us are drinkers." "Oh, of course not," said the intruder, with something like a sneer. "None of us are drinkers, but then we're all liable to get a little too much sometimes, especially when we sit up late and play poker."

The voice of the Bromo still breaks the silence of the deep valley with a mysterious undertone, but only benignant Devas haunt this flower-filled hollow, remote alike from the terrors of Nature and the influences of the external world. The following day varies the character of the range, exposed to every vicissitude of temperature and climate.