Her bloodshot eyes and fiendish
countenance paralyzed the beholder, and her touch turned him to stone.
She was a jealous and vindictive monster, delighting in cruelty, and at
the slightest provocation overwhelming the unoffending victims of her
rage in widespread ruin."
The superstition regarding the Goddess Pele was thought to have received
a death blow in 1825, when Kapiolani, an Hawaiian princess and a
Christian convert, ascended, with numerous attendants, to the crater of
Kilauea, where she publicly defied the power and wrath of the goddess.
No response came to her defiance, she descended in safety, and faith in
Pele's power was widely shaken.
Yet as late as 1887 the old superstition revived and claimed an exalted
victim, for in that year the Princess Like Like, the youngest sister of
the king, starved herself to death to appease the anger of the Goddess
Pele, supposed to be manifested in Mauna Loa's eruption of that year,
and to be quieted only by the sacrifice of a victim of royal blood. Thus
slowly do the old superstitions die away.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Popocatapetl and Other Volcanoes of Mexico and Central America.
Mexico is very largely a vast table-land, rising through much of its
extent to an elevation of from 7,000 to 8,000 feet above sea-level, and
bounded east and west by wide strips of torrid lowlands adjoining the
oceans. It is crossed at about 19 degrees north latitude by a range of
volcanic mountains, running in almost a straight line east and west,
upon which are several extinct volcanic cones, and five active or
quiescent volcanoes.
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