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You are looking west from a point part way up the slope of the present active crater. The rim from which you could look down into the chimney is about three miles from here away up the steeps directly behind you. The cone on whose side you are standing now is like the central holder in the candlestick and you are looking out across the "saucer" to a break in its rim. The fact is, this "saucer," now about fourteen miles across, was once an enormous open crater, belching molten lava and spitting red-hot volcanic dust and breathing thick, deadly sulphurous vapor; but, in the course of centuries, it has cooled down and hardened over the surface, and its volcanic rock has become disintegrated and transformed into soil; so it comes about that you see all these smiling green farms growing as peacefully as if they had always been here. Many of these fields are rice-fields; they have to be laid out perfectly level to allow of generous irrigation, as rice grows only in very wet, muddy soil. Barley and millet are also raised hereabouts. There are more than a thousand people today getting a happy commonplace living right here in this cooled-down crater. 

Kumamoto is twenty-five miles away at the west, almost straight beyond that break in the old rim of the crater, and Nagasaki is fifty miles farther still in the same direction. 

There are shrines up on the mountain behind you where prayers are offered to the Buddhist and Shinto gods. Indeed it seems natural enough that the spirits of Fire and Earth should be reverenced in a place like this, if anywhere in the world!

(For geological explanations of volcanic formations see general works like Shaler's "Aspects of the Earth;" for interesting comments on Japanese religious ideas, read Davidson's "Present Day Japan," Lafcadio Hearn's  "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" etc.)

From Notes of Travel, No. 9, copyright, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood. 


Rice fields in the old crater of Aso San. Japan. 
Champs de ris dans l'ancien cratère de Aso San, Japon. 
Reisfelder im Alten Krater des Aso San. Japan.
Campos de arroz en el antigua cratère de Aso San, Japon. 
Risfält vid Aso-San, Japan. 
Рисовыя плантаціи въ старомъ кратерѣ, Азо Санъ. Японія.

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