Word: lava
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After a day of uncertainty, they saw the lava slip slowly down the slope. Little jets of steam hissed from the mountain's side. The 10,000 inhabitants reluctantly prepared to leave. White surpliced priests marched chanting part way up the volcano. In supplication and prayer they bore relics of St. Vitus, born in Sicily, or St. Leonardo, their patron saint...
...lava advanced inch by inch. As it slid forward it cooled and made a wall which checked the lava behind it. Sometimes this wall slowly mounted to a height of 50 feet...
...gray crinkled hide of an elephant. At night it was an arabesque pattern of vermilion, magenta, citron. Then the top of the wall would curl like a malevolent phosphorus wave. With a crash as of metallic surf it would topple, advance, cool, form another wall. For some reason the lava moved more swiftly at night. Even from Messina, at the northern tip of Sicily, it could be seen slipping down Etna, like a tiny blazing snake...
Author James Stevens, onetime hobo teamster, of Tacoma, Wash., is famed as the chronicler of superhuman Paul Bunyan, the mythical hero of North American lumber camps. Author Stevens is an authority on other mythical creatures of North America including lava bears, sand gougers, lightning birds, waumpus cats, treehoppers and minktums (TIME, Aug. 2, 1926, BOOKS). Last week, announcement was made of another Stevens extravaganza, an allegorical U. S. fable entitled "Staggerbear and Guzzlenot" which Plain Talk, the monthly magazine publishing it, condensed for publicity purposes as follows...
...desolate volcanic waste near Punta Baja, Edward H. Davis of the Museum of the American Indian (Manhattan), found vast caverns decorated with mural paintings. In one cave the ceiling bristled with arrows shot into it at least 500 years ago. Carved stone vessels and long-walled lanes through the lava floes indicated high culture among the Cochimi, Guaycuru and Pericue Indians whom Spanish travelers reported finding on that lonely coast in the 16th Century. Ethnologist Davis judged that these tribes were gigantic in stature...