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Updated: May 9, 2025
Strictly speaking, Boro-Boedor is not a temple but a hill, rising about one hundred and fifty feet above the plain, encased with terraces constructed of hewn lava-blocks and crowded with sculptures, which, if placed side by side, would extend for upwards of three miles. The lowest terrace now above ground forms a square, each side approximately five hundred feet long.
After eating a little hardtack, each of us leveled a spot to lie on among lava-blocks and cinders. The night was cold, and the wind coming down upon us in stormy surges drove gritty ashes and fragments of pumice about our ears while chilling to the bone.
When the brothers had clambered down the rugged slope covered with scattered lava-blocks to the sandy nook where now stands the hamlet of the "Ciéné-quilla," clouds had again lifted over Hashyuko, and on the slope of the high Sierra the bluish cloudlet swam clear and distinct. Much water ran in the bed of the river at the mouth of the Bocas, and there was no hope of finding any tracks there.
Its colour is lighter than that of the lava-blocks surrounding it, but its farther end is dark. Now that end moves, and the head of an Indian, a village Indian of New Mexico, looms up above the boulders. The coyote has seen enough, for the man is alive, and not carrion. Away the beast trots, with drooping tail and ears.
He pays no attention to their flight, but moves on toward the lava-blocks that indicate the rim of the plateau. There he has noticed something; an object that lies motionless like a corpse. It may be a corpse, and therefore something to prey upon. Nearer the coyote glides. The object is long or elongated.
Mediaeval intensity, curiously at variance with antique feeling, is discernible throughout. The satellites of Hades are gaunt and sinewy devils, eager to do violence to Eurydice. Pluto himself drives his jarring car-wheels up through the lava-blocks and flames of Etna with a fury and a vehemence we seek in vain upon antique sarcophagi.
It was a land of horror, where there was nothing but the abomination of desolation a land overstrewn with blasted fragments of fractured lava-blocks, intermixed with sand, from which there arose black precipices and giant mountains that poured forth rivers of fire and showers of ashes and sheets of flame.
In some places a side path leading off the main road to a tomb has been uncovered, paved with the original lava-blocks as fresh as when the last mourner retired from it, casting "a lingering look behind;" but it leads now only to a shapeless heap of brick, or to the empty site of a monument that has been razed to the very foundations.
Why do the pilgrims from all over the empire exclaim joyfully, while climbing Fuji's cinder-beds and lava-blocks, "I am a man of Omi"? Why, when quenching their thirst with the melted snow-water of Fuji crater, do they cry out "I am drinking from Lake Biwa"? Why do the children clap their hands, as they row or sail over Biwa's blue surface, and say: "I am on top of Fuji Yama"?
Finally the exiles established a hundred stations, selecting for the purpose large rooms, in which they built hearths of lava-blocks taken from the streets, in most of the houses the hearths being placed in the centre of an upper room, and an opening directly above cut through the roof.
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