Furnas And The Garden Of The Gods

( Originally Published 1905 )

On this morn

When the exulting elements in scorn

Satiated with destroyed destruction lay Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,

As panthers sleep.

—Shelley.

" SEE Furnas, and if you are going to pass the winter in the Azores, Horta is the place for you," said senhor D'Ullua to me one morning in the breakfast room of the "Azor." Horta is the seaport city of Fayal and is grinding its teeth with jealous rage in face of the growing prosperity of Ponta Delgada. The senhor was from Fayal and was loyal to his island. He had passed a rather uncomfortable year in Boston and was successfully trying to forget his English, which he spoke in fragments. He was also making commendable but futile efforts to erase from his memory all recollection of the climate of New England which he blasphemously declared was "Nove mezes de inverno e tres de inferno"—nine months of frost and ice and three of hell. I made no attempt to contradict him for I was then an exile from my own land, driven to the South by a northern specialist.

So the next morning in the company of a Lisbon gentleman and his wife I started for Furnas. The road was equal to the best I had seen in Europe, the only fault in it being the dangerous curves around the dizzy sides of the mountains. Everywhere there were signs of age and long occupation. The paths leading over the rocky heights had been worn by the feet of men and animals for hundreds of years.

Following the road we reached a point where it abruptly descends, known as Pedros do Galligo, and a thousand feet below lay the Cintra Michaleuse, the Azorean Vale of Tempe—the boast and pride of all the island, the valley of the Furnas. Right across on the opposite side of the crater, we saw the ever-rising smoke of the boiling geysers, whose sulphurous and noxious fumes kill all vegetation in their immediate neighbourhood. Here in 1522 occurred one of the most stupendous volcanic eruptions of modern times. The ashes vomited enveloped the whole island in murky darkness, and covered the land from five to seventeen inches deep with ashes, powdered pumice, and arenaceous trap. The year of the upheaval is, to this day, called "0 anno dos Cines," or the ash year.

The eruptions were preceded by earthquakes, when the sea swallowed old islands and gave birth to new ones, some of which remain to this day. Mountains were hurled into valleys, and valleys rose to mountains. A submarine crater burst forth and formed an island ten miles in circumference, which disappeared, in one night, as mysteriously as it came. A thick mantle of ashes, sand and lava from submarine and subaerial eruptions darkened the heavens. At Villa Franca a mountain fell upon the town, burying for all time five thousand people. In sixty seconds a tidal wave rolled over the huge grave. When the sea receded and the living began a search for the dead amid the ruins, the excavators came upon the skeleton of a mounted horseman, booted and spurred, with lance poised, mired and engulfed as he was fleeing from the doomed city.

Upon the ashes of the buried city a second Villa Franca arose, which has now a population of from four to five thousand souls. A lake three miles in circumference disappeared, leaving at the level of its waters a rich deposit of pozzolana—a bright red, granulated earth. But Furnas was the very focus and theatre of igneous activity on the island.

Today the awful evidences of its devastating ruin are seen everywhere. Truncated cones rise all around you, whose scarped and deeply furrowed sides, with their immense concavities, tell of the frightful agonies and convulsions of the mother which bore them. The erosion and rain of centuries have deepened the lava furrows of the mountainsides and a luxuriant growth of giant ferns and tropical cryptomeria is bearding them with hoary and venerable age. Eight miles south-west of Furnas the highest mountain then in the island was lifted from its base, flung into a distant valley, and a crater four miles in circumference was created. The lips of this gigantic basin rise eighteen hundred feet above its bed. Here repose in windless peace Lagoa Grande, whose waters are a bright emerald, and Azul Lake, rivalling its companion in cerulean blue.

The day preceding the eruption was of exceptional calmness, the air was heavy and oppressive, a drowsy stillness brooded over the land. Pasturing cattle herded side by side, sheep bunched closer, and the dog of the shepherd crouched at his master's feet and looked up enquiringly into his face. The stillness continued to deepen, till a sense of loneliness entered into the habitations of man, followed by melancholy and foreboding. No stars were in the cloudless sky that night, the moon swung blood red over the distant hills. At two in the morning the mountain trembled, swayed like a ship on a billowy ocean, when, with a roar heard far out to sea, its crest rose high in the air, and fell into a neighbouring lake, known to this day as Lagoa Secca, or Dry Lake.

Straight up into the heavens, above the loftiest peak of the highest mountain, rose a huge column of fire, and out from the womb of the monster came pillars of smoke and flame. Fearful detonations, produced by escaping gas and bursting lava bombs, followed in rapid succession. Lurid flames and weird lights appeared in the heavens, and a fierce heat scorched all vegetation for miles around. Rocks of blackest lava, many tons in weight, were shot high in the air, and falling crushed into fragments the shepherds' cabins. The darkness beyond the focus of disturbance, the rumbling of noises like unto a thousand wagons on a rough road, the mysterious sounds under the earth's surface, the poisonous exhalations of decomposing sulphates, of escaping carbonic acids and chlorides, alternating with dense showers of cinders, ashes and stones, portended the dissolution of the world and the dawning of eternity.

Man was beside himself with terror; to him the spiral flame was the flash of the uplifted sword, and the column of light, the gleam of the arm of the avenging angel. It was as if the universe was dissolving and the divine Dramaturgist had chosen these fire-capped mountains and blazing peaks for the stage on which to produce the initial act of the sublime and awful drama. People died of fright; some, to use the words of Holy Writ, "withered away from fear;" others lost their reason, and ever after were raving maniacs or sullen idiots.

The flowing lava caught the fleeing sheep and cattle as they rushed for shelter, swept them into a grove of pine-trees, and engulfed them for all time. Under seventeen feet of scoriae, basalt, and ashes they lie buried, and no eye may look upon the ruins of the holocaust. At the same time in a south-east part of the island another mountain was destroyed, and a vast crater formed, on whose bosom floats Lagoa Foco, or the Lake of Fire, around whose shores the beautiful cahellinho fern attains giant proportions, and immense beds of remarkable moss, holding water like a sponge, abound.

Ashes fell in Portugal, eight hundred miles away, while thick layers of cinders mixed with pumice floated two hundred miles out to sea and compelled inward-bound vessels to change their course. For three days and nights no sun, moon, or stars shone in the gloomy firmament, and the whole island was shrouded in darkness.

That Furnas was the focus and theatre of igneous activity is proved by the truncated cones of all sizes, the scarped and deeply furrowed sides of which, with their immense concavities, tell of the tyrant power which gave them birth. Since this appalling catastrophe the lava furrows have been deepened by rain and erosion, and are now stupendous ravines, like unto the canyons of Arizona, whose sides are robed with masses of hanging trees and giant cryptomeria. To-day the valley of Furnas is a dream of joy, whose princely gardens, like that of senhor do Conto, invite comparison with those of the world. The village of seven hundred souls nestles in its arms, surrounded by orange groves, fig trees and fruitful vineyards, calm and peaceful as the sea when the storm dies away. All that remain to remind the present generation that this fair vale was once the theatre of as grand and spectacular a drama as was ever given to the eye of man to look upon are the geysers and burning springs which day and night throw up columns of steam, hot water, and blue-gray mud. Here, heated by fires invisible, from depths unknown, five boiling caldrons burst from the earth, rise high in the air, are dissipated in steam or form rivulets of hot and boiling waters, which converging into a small river, flow peacefully through the village.

Here, also, from the Boca de Inferno—the mouth of hell—with the pause and regularity of a trip hammer, is vomited the gray-blue mud collected by the peasantry for its supposed curative qualities, when applied to diseases of the scalp. The mouth of this dismal abyss is frightful to look into, and the depth of the dark and terrible chasm no plummet has ever sounded. If one could look down upon the awful furnace beneath, and view the lake of fire, what a memory would be his for all time.