Unexplored! Part 19

"Yes, but it didn't taint our food any. It was an ideal steam cooker.

Farther down the valley were some vents hot enough to fry bacon."

"I should think it would have steamed it," said Ted.

"No, we found one vent where the steam came so hot that it didn't condense for several feet above ground; the only trouble was that the frying pan had a tendency to go flying up in the air and the cook had to have a strong arm to hold it down."

At the picture his memory evoked, Norris burst into hearty chuckles. "As the bacon got crisp, of course it didn't weigh so heavy, and there always came a point where it began to fly out of the pan. Then we'd all stand around, and it was the liveliest man that caught the most breakfast.

"There was another camp convenience, too, there in Hades, as the valley has been named."

"Thar, didn't I tell you so?" triumphed Long Lester.

"And they named the river Lethe. A river that ran down from the melting glaciers,--though it almost all goes up in smoke, as it were,--in steam, before it gets out of the hot part. This river whirls along, and in places the steam actually boils up through the ice water, or along the banks. I used to think it was an awful pity there were no fish in that stream, because we could have cooked them without taking them off the hook."

"Huh!" The old prospector shook his head. "I've thought all along this here was a fish story."

"But it's gospel truth," Norris a.s.sured him. "I mean about the valley. I _said_ there were no fish. Everything we ate, by the way, had to be packed in on our backs. It was no place for horses, where in places the ground fairly shook beneath our feet, and if it were to give way, we'd find ourselves sure enough in hot water."

"It must have been almighty dangerous," gasped Ted.

"Well, not after we learned the ropes. Sometimes we accidentally put a foot through a thin place and steam came through. I a.s.sure you we stepped lively then. At other times our feet sank into the soft, hot mud.

"By the way, there is a mountain across the head of the valley that looks like a crouching dog, and it has been named Cerberus."

"Were those geysers, those ten thousand smokes?" asked the old prospector.

"No, a geyser comes after volcanic activity, while here something is still likely to happen. A geyser begins as a column of steam and hot water, which erupts as often as the water gets to the boiling point. It follows that the water must acc.u.mulate in rock not so hot that it would instantly vaporize it. But the rock underlying this valley is so hot that no water can acc.u.mulate."

"How large are the vents through which the steam comes?" asked Ted.

"All sizes down to nothing at all. There are even a few craters 100 feet across, that have been produced by volcanic explosions. You will find these craters, generally, along a large fissure, just the way you find the Aleutian chain of volcanoes along a fissure in the earth's crust several hundred miles in length.

"There are fissures all along the margins of the valley, besides those in the center, and many of these have one side standing higher than the other, showing them to be earthquake faults,--the same sort of thing we see here in the rocks of the Sierras. And you should hear the hissing and roaring of the steam as it forces its way up through these fissures from the hot depths beneath. Sometimes it looks like blue smoke, it is so full of gases, especially sulphur dioxide, the gas that is given off by burning sulphur. So the popular notion of Hades isn't so far off after all, eh?"

"Could you smell the sulphur fumes?"

"Sometimes, yes,--when the other gases did not overwhelm the odor. But the weirdest part of all is the incrustations along the borders of the vents. All colors of the rainbows--shapes as fantastic as anything in fairyland. Lots of yellow, of course, from the sulphur,--crystals of it, some of them neighbor to an orange tinted crystal, lying in the blue mud.

It was a beautiful color combination. Then there were green and gray alum crystals which looked like growing lichens. There were also deep green algae actually growing. Strange how certain designs are used over and over again in nature! In other places the mud is actually burned brick red, especially where the fumaroles are burnt out. This shades to purple, and in other places to pink. But the most surprising, perhaps, were the white vents just tinted with a delicate pink or cream.

"The largest fissure of all, one lying at the foot of Mt. Mageik, is filled with the clear green water of a melted glacier. And above, the mountain smokes away into the clouds!"

"It must be a marvelous place!" said Ace. "I suppose it was regular ice water."

Norris laughed. "That is the funny part of it. It's not. The water is actually warm, or rather, tepid, in places, on account of the heat from below."

"So you had good swimming even in Alaska."

"We might have had. And then I must tell you about Novarupta. That's the largest vent in the valley, and it is something you won't see very many places in the world, a new volcano. It was only formed at the time of the eruption of 1912, and it is one of the largest volcanoes in the world to-day,--with a crater much larger than that of Vesuvius."

"But Mr. Norris, do y' mind my asking," Pedro hesitated, "but how do you know it is a new volcano? Don't volcanoes sometimes burst forth again after many years of quiet?"

"They do, but there is where the rocks tell the story again. Instead of bursting forth from a mountain top, through igneous rock, (left from the time when the earth-crust was molten), this one erupted in the valley, in sandstone. On a still day, the smoke will rise as high as ten thousand feet."

Norris, then a student, had been one of the first to view La.s.sen Volcano when, in 1914, it broke its slumber of 200 years. Indeed, he had had a real adventure, as the second outburst had caught him within half a mile of the crater and he had barely escaped with his life. Of course the boys had to hear all about it.

While the Sierra south of La.s.sen has been built more through uplift than volcanic activity, at least since the Tertiary period, he explained, the Cascades and indeed, the whole range to the northward through Oregon and Was.h.i.+ngton, is a product of lava flow.

Happening to be about to start on a camping trip in the Feather River region at the time of the first eruption, he and his companion had hastened immediately to the scene of so much geological history making.

The smoke and ashes that billowed forth had been visible for fifty miles, and the accompanying earthquake shocks had been accompanied by a downpour of rain.

Climbing the path of a recent snow-slide, which had cleared a narrow path in the fifteen-foot drifts, they could smell sulphur strongly from near the South base onward. Veering around to the East, past half a dozen cinder cones, they finally reached a narrow ridge leading directly to, as yet unoccupied, the fire outlook station. Clambering over crags so steep, finally, that they could not see ahead, they came to the little square building, now tattered by the stones that had fallen through its roof, tethered to the few feet of s.p.a.ce available by wire cables that seemed to hold it down in the teeth of the winds. Suddenly below them lay the bowl of the ancient crater, bordered by snow fields now gray with ash. That the ash had not been hot they judged from the fact that it had nowise melted the snow, but lay on its surface. From the ragged edge of the steaming basin, yellow with sulphur, rose the oppressive fumes they had been getting more and more strongly. How deep was this funnel to the interior of the earth? To their amazement it appeared to be only about 80 feet deep. That, they decided,--coupled with the fact that the ash and rocks exploded had not been hot, but cold, must be because the sides of the crater, as they gradually caved in, must have choked the neck of the crater with debris, which had been expelled when the smoke and gases had been exploded. There had been no lava flow, then!

They had retraced their steps to perhaps half a mile's distance when of a sudden the earth beneath their feet began to heave and rumble thunderously. Ashes and rocks, some the size of flour sacks, some huge bowlders, began shooting into the air,--observers at a distance a.s.suring them afterwards that the smoke must have risen 3,000 feet above the peak.

It grew black as midnight, the smoke stung their eyes and lungs and whiffs of sulphur nearly overwhelmed them.

It was a position of deadly peril. Quick as thought, they ran, Norris dragging his companion after him, beneath the shelter of an overhanging ledge, where at least the rocks could not fall on them, and there they buried their faces in the snow and waited.

What seemed hours was later p.r.o.nounced to have been but fifteen minutes, though with the roaring as of mighty winds, and the subterranean grumblings and sudden inky night, the cras.h.i.+ng of stones and thundering of rolling bowlders, it seemed like the end of the world.

Norris's companion had suffered a blow that dislocated his shoulder, but otherwise they emerged unhurt. They afterwards found several areas on the sides of La.s.sen where sulphurous gases were escaping from pools of hot mud or boiling water. They also visited a lake that had been formed at the time of the lava flow of 200 years ago, (now a matter of legend among the Pitt River Indians), this lava having formed a dam across a little valley which later filled from the melting snows. The stumps of the inundated trees could still be seen.

A geyser, said the Geological Survey man, is just like a volcano, only it expels steam and boiling water from the interior. There is a line of volcanic activity up and down the Pacific Coast, from Alaska to Central America, though La.s.sen is the only active peak in California, Shasta having become quiescent save for the hot spring that steams through the snow near its summit.

The North half of the range, he added, is covered with floods of gla.s.sy black lava and dotted with extinct craters, whereas the Southern half is almost solid granite, though there are plenty of volcanic rocks to be found among its wild gorges. The rocks around La.s.sen tell a vivid story of the chain of fire mountains that must have again and again blazed into geysers of molten rock, till the whole smoking range was quenched beneath the ice of that last glacier period, which through the ages has been sculpturing new lake and river beds, and grinding soil for the rebirth of the mighty forests.

The boys drowsed off that night to dream of fire mountains and explorations in the nether regions.

The next day they planned to bi-plane up and down the John Muir trail again and see if the Mexicans could have crossed to the Eastern side of the range. They might have made their way through some pa.s.s, traveling after nightfall and hiding by day, and once on the desert around Mono Lake they would be easy to locate. For it seemed ridiculous that they could actually make a get-away.

CHAPTER XII

GOLD!

In the pa.s.s between two appalling peaks the two boys sighted the smoke of a cook-fire, and without once reflecting that they were unarmed, pan-caked down for a closer inspection. But there was no need to land. It was a band of Indians. And though they searched till they were ready to drop with fatigue,--and all but frozen stiff in those high alt.i.tudes,--not the sign of a Mexican did they sight after that.

They returned utterly discouraged.

"What kind of Indians were they?" asked Long Lester.

"Oh, just Indians," said the ranch boy.

"That is like saying, oh, just whites," said Norris. "Indians differ more than you would ever imagine."

"Why is that, Mr. Norris?" Ted wanted to know. "They're mostly mighty good for nothing specimens, to judge from our Diggers."