air of a cheap showman springing a novelty upon a gaping mob, "you are
on the edge of the Vermilion Pit, the greatest wonder between Penang and
the Paumotus."


[Illustration]


CHAPTER VIII

THE LEDGE OF DEATH

I suppose that Leith was not far wrong when he gave that place the
credit of being the most wonderful spot in Polynesia. None of us felt
inclined to contradict him as we stood near the lip of the crater and
gazed into it. The thing appalled us. It looked as if some fiend had
bored it between those barriers of black rock as a trap for man and
beast. The entire inner walls, probably from the action of intense heat
upon a peculiar kind of rock, were of a bright vermilion near the top,
gradually changing into darker shades as the eye followed them deeper
and deeper till the outline was lost in the depths of the mighty
cauldron. The inky clouds, which seemed to heave like black masses of
cotton wool far down in the abyss, left the imagination to perform
acrobatic feats as it attempted to picture the possible depths that lay
below. The thing was weird, terrible, fear-inspiring. It looked like a
mighty crucible in which infernal things might have been manufactured in
the days when the world was taking shape.

The rays of the westering sun beat upon the sides directly opposite our
point of observation, and the colours seemed to leap from the rock. It