The summer of 1866, Mark Twain traveled to the island of Hawaii, where he witnessed the great Kilauea volcano – home to Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire – erupting in a blaze of fury.

In His Own Words...

A colossal column of cloud towered to a great height in the air immediately above the crater, and the outer swell of every one of its vast folds was dyed with a rich crimson luster, which was subdued to a pale rose tint in the depressions between.

It glowed like a muffled torch and stretched upward to a dizzy height toward the zenith.

I thought it just possible that, its like had not been seen since the children of Israel wandered on their long march through the desert so many centuries ago, over a path illuminated by the mysterious “pillar of fire.”

And I was sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the majestic “pillar of fire” was like, which almost amounted to a revelation....

I turned to see the effect on the balance of the company, and found the reddest-faced set of men I almost ever saw.

In the strong light, every countenance glowed like red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity!

The place below looked like the infernal regions, and these men like half-cooled devils just come up on a furlough.

Mark Twain

June 3, 1866