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The Grand Curral is the central vent of a volcano originally submarine, and, like the Peak of Tenerife, of the age miocene. Fossils of that epoch have been found upon the crater-walls of both. Subsequent movements capped it with subaerial lavas and conglomerates; and wind and weather, causing constant degradation, deepened the bowl and almost obliterated signs of igneous action.
Above us, higher and higher, towered the crater-walls, while we journeyed on across innumerable lava-flows, turning and twisting a devious way among the adamantine billows of a petrified sea. Saw-toothed waves of lava vexed the surface of this weird ocean, while on either hand arose jagged crests and spiracles of fantastic shape.
Dotted here and there were the shining points and ridges of light marking the peaks and crater-walls which the rays of the rising sun had already touched. Before them and to the right and left rose a vast maze of ragged, splintery peaks and huge ramparts of mountain-walls enclosing plains so far below their summits that the light of neither sun nor earth ever reached them.
He wanted to make the memory permanent and to extend it If it had not been for his vacuum suit and the cannister he carried, Pop would have rubbed his hands. Tall, jagged crater-walls rose from the lunar plain. Monstrous, extended inky shadows stretched enormous distances, utterly black. The sun, like a glowing octopod, floated low at the edge of things and seemed to hate all creation.
He saw the silver needle in the sky fighting momentum above a line of jagged crater-walls. It slowed, and slowed, and curved down as it drew nearer. The pilot killed all forward motion just above the field and came steadily and smoothly down to land between the silvery triangles that marked the landing place.
To this class of craters those of Etna, Vesuvius, and Auvergne belong. It has also been shown that in many instances these crater-walls have been breached on one side, and that streams of molten lava which once occupied the cup to a greater or less height, have poured down the mountain side. Hence the form or outline of many of these fragmental craters is crescent-shaped.
Directed by a regular line of steam-puffs, we attacked El Pilon, the third story, the most modern cone of eruption, the dwarf chimney which looks like a thimble from the sea. Presently we reached a radiating rib of lately ejected lava, possibly the ridge of a dyke, brown below and gradually whitening with sulphuric acid as it rose towards the crater-walls.
We climbed the crater-walls, put the horses over impossible places, rolled stones, and shot wild goats. I did not get any goats. I was too busy rolling stones. One spot in particular I remember, where we started a stone the size of a horse.
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