very near the boiling point, and emitted clouds of steam with a strong
sulphureous odour. It overflows at one point and forms a little stream
of hot water, which at a hundred yards' distance is still too hot to
hold the hand in. A little further on, in a piece of rough wood, were
two other springs not so regular in outline, but appearing to be much
hotter, as they were in a continual state of active ebullition. At
intervals of a few minutes, a great escape of steam or gas took place,
throwing up a column of water three or four feet high.
We then went to the mud-springs, which are about a mile off, and are
still more curious. On a sloping tract of ground in a slight hollow is
a small lake of liquid mud, with patches of blue, red, or white, and
in many places boiling and bubbling most furiously. All around on the
indurated clay are small wells and craters full of boiling mud. These
seem to be forming continually, a small hole appearing first, which
emits jets of steam and boiling mud, which upon hardening, forms a
little cone with a crater in the middle. The ground for some distance is
very unsafe, as it is evidently liquid at a small depth, and bends with
pressure like thin ice. At one of the smaller, marginal jets which I
managed to approach, I held my hand to see if it was really as hot as it
looked, when a little drop of mud that spurted on to my finger scalded
like boiling water.
A short distance off, there was a flat bare surface of rock as smooth
and hot as an oven floor, which was evidently an old mud-pool, dried
up and hardened. For hundreds of yards around where there were banks of
reddish and white clay used for whitewash, it was still so hot close to
the surface that the hand could hardly bear to be held in cracks a few
inches deep, and from which arose a strong sulphureous vapour. I was
informed that some years back a French gentleman who visited these
springs ventured too near the liquid mud, when the crust gave way and he
was engulfed in the horrible caldron.
This evidence of intense heat so near the surface over a large tract
of country was very impressive, and I could hardly divest myself of the
notion that some terrible catastrophe might at any moment devastate
the country. Yet it is probable that all these apertures are really
safety-valves, and that the inequalities of the resistance of various
parts of the earth's crust will always prevent such an accumulation of
force as would be required to upheave and overwhelm any extensive area.
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