it and drenched with its reeking fume, nought but the shape surviving.
Here also are said to be other springs, which now are fed with floods
of rising water, and, overflowing in full channels, cast a mass of spray
upwards; and now again their bubbling flags, and they can scarce be
seen below at the bottom, and are swallowed into deep hiding far under
ground. Hence, when they are gushing over, they bespatter everything
about them with the white spume, but when they are spent the sharpest
eye cannot discern them. In this island there is likewise a mountain,
whose floods of incessant fire make it look like a glowing rock, and
which, by belching out flames, keeps its crest in an everlasting blaze.
This thing awakens our wonder as much as those aforesaid; namely, when
a land lying close to the extreme of cold can have such abundance of
matter to keep up the heat, as to furnish eternal fires with unseen
fuel, and supply an endless provocative to feed the burning. To this
isle also, at fixed and appointed seasons, there drifts a boundless mass
of ice, and when it approaches and begins to dash upon the rugged reefs,
then, just as if the cliffs rang reply, there is heard from the deep a
roar of voices and a changing din of extraordinary clamour. Whence it
is supposed that spirits, doomed to torture for the iniquity of their
guilty life, do here pay, by that bitter cold, the penalty of their
sins. And so any portion of this mass that is cut off when the aforesaid
ice breaks away from the land, soon slips its bonds and bars, though it
be made fast with ever so great joins and knots. The mind stands dazed
in wonder, that a thing which is covered with bolts past picking, and
shut in by manifold and intricate barriers, should so depart after that
mass whereof it was a portion, as by its enforced and inevitable flight
to baffle the wariest watching. There also, set among the ridges
and crags of the mountains, is another kind of ice which is known
periodically to change and in a way reverse its position, the upper
parts sinking to the bottom, and the lower again returning to the top.