Thus the pool has constructed an intermittent geyser. If the water
supply continues, it also destroys itself. The throat closes up by its
own deposits. It is a case of geyseral membranous croup.
I exceedingly longed to try vivisection on a geyser, or at least take
one of half a hundred, drain it off, and make a post-mortem
examination. On my very last day I found opportunity. I found a dead
geyser, though not by any means yet cold. It was still so hot that
people had given it an infernal name. I squeezed myself down through
its hot throat, which seemed a veritable open sepulcher, and found a
cave about twenty-five feet deep, twelve feet wide, and about sixty
feet long. It was elliptical in form, the sides coming together at a
sharp angle at the ends, bottom, and top. The way down to the fiery
heart of the earth had simply grown up by deposits of silex on the
sides and at the bottom. The water had evaporated by the intense heat,
and I was in the hot hollow that had once held an earthquake and
volcano. When I squeezed up to the blessed upper air I was glad there
was no help from below.
I could tell of mounds that grew so fast as to inclose the limbs of a
tree, making the firmest kind of a ladder by which I climbed to the
top; of floods that overflowed acres of forest, leaving every tree
firmly planted in solid rock; of mounds hundreds of feet high, covering
twenty acres with forms of indescribable beauty--but I despair.
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