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But that's a most unhealthy spot he has chosen to live in." "Why does he stay there?" I explained about the volcano. "You can have no idea what an obsession it is with him. There isn't a square foot of its steaming, treacherous surface that he hasn't been over, mapping new fissures, poking into old lava-beds, delving into the crater itself on favorable days " "Isn't it dangerous?" "In a way, yes.
True, year in and year out the streets were torn up, presenting an aspect not unlike the lava-beds of Vesuvius; but as this phase always implies, not destruction, but construction, murmurs were only local and few. It was a prosperous and busy city. It grew, it grows, and will grow. Long life to it! Every year the city directory points with pride to its growing bulk.
Those of the female are flattened throughout their entire length, are less curved than those of the male, and much smaller, measuring less than a foot along the curve. A ram and ewe that I obtained near the Modoc lava-beds, to the northeast of Mount Shasta, measured as follows: Ram. Ewe. ft. in. ft. in.
I think it was the song of one of the honey-suckers, a red bird with black wings that in flight looked like our scarlet tanager. Our course took us out over the cracked and contorted lava-beds, where no green thing was growing. The forms of the lava-flow suggested mailed and writhing dragons, with horrid, gaping mouths and vicious claws.
Our Geysers are the finest, the bitterest, the smokiest, the noisiest, the most infernal in the world; and as for mountains, our Shasta Bute would knock your Mount Hecla into a cocked hat!" "Is it possible!" "Of course it is." "And have you great lava-beds covering whole valleys as we have here?" "Certainly only they are made of gold. We call them Placers Gold Placers."
There are a few bushes growing outside the walls, and there we found the Nopal bush, the great prickly pear the same that has established itself all round the shores of the Mediterranean growing in crevices of rocks, and cracks in lava-beds, and barren places where nothing else will live.
On my return Zoega was saddling up the horses. A cup of coffee and a dry biscuit put me in traveling order, and we were soon on our way up the valley. For the first few miles we followed the range of the "Jau," from which we then diverged across the great lava-beds of Thingvalla.
The evidences of volcanic action are everywhere apparent, in the huge masses and curious columns of basaltic and trap-rock, the lava-beds through which the rivers have found their way, and the powdery alkaline soil. The marks of glaciers are also as distinct in the bowlders, and the scooping-out of the beds of lakes.
Not so white as the metal pouring from a blast furnace, not so hot, a more sullen red, but welling up from the central primordial fires of the earth. This great pot has boiled over many times in the recent past, as the lava-beds we traveled over testify, and it will probably boil over again. It has been unusually active these last few years.
A man who is kept awake all night by one set of love ditties, dragged out of his bed before sunrise, and after taking exercise and a bath that render him as hungry as a Modoc cut off from his lava-beds, is expected and forced to hold his famished frame in peace, while a pair of human lovers exhaust the vocabulary of cooing that man can patiently excuse much. Sit down, my dear girl.
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