i removed swiftly.the old lady from chicago shrieked."what a wicked waste!"said her husband.
i think they call it the riverside geyser.its spout was torn and ragged like the mouth of a gun when a shell has burst there.
it grumbled madly for a moment or two,and then was still.icrept over the steaming lime--it was the burning marl on which satan lay--and looked fearfully down its mouth.you should never look a gift geyser in the mouth.
i beheld a horrible,slippery,slimy funnel with water rising and falling ten feet at a time.then the water rose to lip level with a rush,and an infernal bubbling troubled this devil's bethesda before the sullen heave of the crest of a wave lapped over the edge and made me run.
mark the nature of the human soul!i had begun with awe,not to say terror,for this was my first experience of such things.istepped back from the banks of the riverside geyser,saying:--"pooh!is that all it can do?"yet for aught i knew,the whole thing might have blown up at a minute's notice,she,he,or it being an arrangement of uncertain temper.
we drifted on,up that miraculous valley.on either side of us were hills from a thousand or fifteen hundred feet high,wooded from crest to heel.as far as the eye could range forward were columns of steam in the air,misshapen lumps of lime,mist-like preadamite monsters,still pools of turquoise-blue stretches of blue corn-flowers,a river that coiled on itself twenty times,pointed bowlders of strange colors,and ridges of glaring,staring white.
a moon-faced trooper of german extraction--never was park so carefully patrolled--came up to inform us that as yet we had not seen any of the real geysers;that they were all a mile or so up the valley,and tastefully scattered round the hotel in which we would rest for the night.
america is a free country,but the citizens look down on the soldier.i had to entertain that trooper.the old lady from chicago would have none of him;so we loafed alone together,now across half-rotten pine logs sunk in swampy ground,anon over the ringing geyser formation,then pounding through river-sand or brushing knee-deep through long grass.