Word: craterous
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...Palace, a member of the palace guard was lying dead in a pool of blood. Knots of people headed for the barracks, where the Lend-Lease equipment was being distributed to civilians. The rebels planted three 105-mm. shells on San José Fortress, turned it into a huge crater, belching hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of Lend-Lease explosives. Loyal artillery in Matamoros Fortress laid 20 shells into the barracks of the Honor Guard before Matamoros itself was reduced to rubble. White flags appeared, twelve hours after the revolt had started. Almost 1,800 had been killed...
...near the Pacific, 200 miles west of Mexico City. Paricutin, the new volcano which erupted from a cornfield, has grown to a mountain some 1,500 feet high and shows no signs of weakening. Natives call it El Monstruo. Belching 2,700 tons of fiery rock a minute, the crater has over-awed hundreds of tourists. At its more spectacular moments, spectators break into applause. One woman, after watching for a few minutes, broke into tears and hysteria. Hardened volcanologists, by their own account, have come away dazed and with knees shaking. Said Dr. William F. Foshag of the Smithsonian...
...Dionisio Pulido, plowing his cornfield, suddenly felt the ground rumble and saw a great column of white smoke burst from the ground. He ran to the priest in the village of Paricutin, two miles away. By the time priest and villagers arrived, the crater was belching molten rock and lava. In a week it had raised a cone 500 feet high; in ten weeks, 1,000 feet. Then lava, erupting from the crater's top and sides, began to ooze over the countryside...
Meanwhile, over a radius of 35 miles, the crater has laid a blanket of ash, like black snow. It blackens people's faces so they look like coal miners, crushes roofs, kills trees, in some places is piled to rooftop height. Near the base of the crater, where the scientists, keeping an eye out for falling bombs, have been working, steam and gas pours from deep holes (fumeroles) with red-hot sides. Said Dr. McGrew: "This seemed like a glance into Hades." Though El Monstruo has spread terror among the Indian natives, birds and animals seem unperturbed, and spiders...
...leave the tortured slope. Lively, pint-sized Professor Giuseppe Imbo, director of the Vesuvian Royal Observatory and foremost authority on the volcano, clung to his tiny workshop halfway up the mountain. Through four days & nights he scarcely ate, barely slept or washed. Alone he crept to the boiling crater's edge, closely charted the lava flow, checked his seismograph by kerosene lamp...