He thought that a run of three hundred yards would carry us over the hottest part of the floor and leave us our shoe-soles.

His pluck gave me back-bone.

We took one lantern and instructed the guides to hang the other to the roof of the look-out house to serve as a beacon for us in case we got lost, and then the party started back up the precipice and Marlette and I made our run.
We skipped over the hot floor and over the red crevices with brisk dispatch and reached the cold lava safe but with pretty warm feet.

Then we took things leisurely and comfortably, jumping tolerably wide and probably bottomless chasms, and threading our way through picturesque lava upheavals with considerable confidence.

When we got fairly away from the cauldrons of boiling fire, we seemed to be in a gloomy desert, and a suffocatingly dark one, surrounded by dim walls that seemed to tower to the sky.