Word: lavas
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Again explosions, smoke, lava and destruction visited the Pacific. This time a fractured lake bottom contributed heavily to the event by emptying a deep body of water in a sudden and enormous sluice upon mountain hamlets and terraced, rice-grown countryside. About 1,000 were killed, though a month of anticipatory rumbling had warned them to flee. The eruption was out of the bowels of Mount Tokachi, in the centre of Hokkaido, northernmost of the main islands of the island empire of Japan and last retreat of the Hairy Ainus.* One of the 50 technically active of Japan...
...fortnight a snow-crowned protuberance of the earth in mid-Pacific rumbled and smoked and discharged flaming dragons of molten lava to writhe down and be drowned with great hissing in the sea. By the end of last week, all was quiet again. The dragons lay dead, their heads in the water. Little animalcules?human beings?swarmed about and ventured to walk on the monsters' cooling hides. One man?Dr. Thomas A. Jaggar of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory?climbed high up on the protuberance?Mauna Loa, one of Hawaii's two active volcanoes and the largest in the world?...
...Mauna Loa's first eruption in five years. Comparatively little destruction attended it. Few, if any, lives were lost. The lava flowed chiefly south and west from three orifices, demolishing but one village, Hoopuloa (chief remaining centre of grass-skirt dancing), which it buried 50 feet deep. An eastward flow demolished four ranch houses...
Earthquakes followed the lava, of sufficient violence to move buildings eight inches in the island's principal settlement, Hilo, on the east coast. In the mahogany and sandalwood forests and sugar plantations under Mauna Loa's great flanks, damage was extensive, though for the most part the lava followed its old paths, which lie arid and deserted...
...life, although she may destroy human habitation. The legend says that, jilted by a mortal lover, she slew him and then was so mortified she made a vow never to do such a thing again. Herds of cattle that have climbed naturally to a knoll or ridge to escape lava, are said to have been "spared" by Pele, who sent her wrath around them. A man whose legs were clipped off by a hot boulder was said, after his demise, to have "stumbled into a crevice...