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Updated: May 12, 2025
This was the famous Forum of Vulcan, where the god fashioned his terrible tools, and shook the earth with the fierce fires of his forge. On account of its gaseous fumaroles, and the flames thrown out with a loud roaring noise from one gloomy cavern in its side, this volcano may still be considered active.
Fresh craters formed in the vast depths of sand and molten metal; the three new volcanoes Bromo, Battok, and Widodaren casting themselves up from the blazing crucibles hidden beneath the fire-charged earth. We stand on the thin and crumbling crust of the globe's most friable surface, a mere veil concealing fountains of eternal fire, foaming solfataras, and smoking fumaroles.
The island, which was of irregular outline and lay low upon the wide sea, had a total area, I suppose, of seven or eight square miles. It was volcanic in origin, and was now fringed on three sides by coral reefs; some fumaroles to the northward, and a hot spring, were the only vestiges of the forces that had long since originated it.
Its main peculiarity is in the fumaroles, or escapes of steam, and mofetti, mephitic emanations of limpid water and sulphur-vapour. Of these we counted five narices within as many hundred yards. Their temperature greatly varies, 109 deg. and 158 deg. Fahr. being, perhaps, the extremes; my thermometer showed 130 deg.. These soupiraux or respiradouros are easily explained.
In places the steep banks were clothed with green trees, pines and larches, and at the foot of the escarpments there shot upwards innumerable white fumaroles, the vapor escaping from the soil as from an enormous reservoir in which the water is kept in permanent ebullition by subterranean fire.
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