The vermilion walls,
thirty yards in front of us, formed part of the sides of an enormous
circular crater, and we stood spellbound as we pulled up within a few
feet of the ledge and looked into the fearsome depths beneath.
"Ladies and gentlemen," drawled Leith, looking around at us with the
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.
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