Nowhere is the tense, quiet, sacred breath of Pele felt more than on a calm dark night on the coastal flats of Kilauea, in the presence of a slow-moving pahoehoe lava flow amidst an empty sea of black lava rock. As a volunteer I took every opportunity to walk the 3 or 4 miles across the barren landscape from the end of Chain of Craters road out to wherever lava happened to be flowing.

Sometimes there was the acute excitement of explosive activity where the liquid rock was dripping into the ocean, but much more often activity was benign: with very little slope, a lava flow spreads out and loses energy, slowly solidifying and inching forward. The flow's surface cools and hardens, hiding the still-active lava within. As long as the source of the lava flow continues to supply fresh liquid rock to the body of the flow, it will continue to move, slowly, almost imperceptibly. You can walk right up and stand at the edge of such a flow. During the day it can be difficult to tell what is active and what isn't - until you get close. The heat is intense, and standing less than a few yards from it is difficult, especially if the wind is not in your favor. But it appears hardened and dead. And then you hear it. The breath of Pele? The rock surface begins to swell, a deep inhalation. Cracks form, and suddenly, as if with an exhale, bright orange lava oozes forth. Quickly at first, rapidly cooling, folding upon itself to create strange ropey structures, and finally freezing, black and solid. And it swells again, another breath...

At night, such a lava flow is lit up like city lights. Thousands of discrete light sources, cracks through which the glow escapes, invisible in bright daylight. The fearsome night marchers from nightmarish Hawaiian legends? And here and there, sudden areas of extreme brightness - fresh breakouts! We'd scramble to find a path through the scorched terrain to get a closer view... What really got to me were the sounds: as fresh lava moves across older, solid rock, the rock surface shatters with the sound of thin sheets breaking glass. It was unexpected, and somehow soothing. And other sounds sometimes revealed themselves - a dusty whirlwind whipping past, eerie birds making strange dolphin-like noises somewhere just beyond our vision, sending chills down my spine... We would sit and watch such flows for hours, moving backwards every so often as the front advanced towards us.

It's a very hypnotic experience, with no interruption and nothing else around for miles and miles. But you do have to remember to stay alert - it's certainly possible to lose track of all of the edges of a spreading flow, and getting surrounded would certainly spell an unpleasant doom! And of course it wasn't always a nice clear night. The southeastern slope of Hawai'i gets a fair amount of precipitation, and at night the rain creeps up and suddenly pounces. On the flow field, there isn't much in the way of shelter. Not much to do but, uh, soak it up, plodding back the 3 or 4 miles in rain and darkness, no trail, uneven rocky ground... It was always an adventure!