OF THE MINERAL WORK.

Furthermore, the fire of these mountains does not heat intensely, but for the most part smokes obscurely; yet the adjacent earth, for a space of some miles, heats up significantly, so that you cannot stand there for long without injury to your feet. Waters also flowing over or from them turn out to be very hot, clearly smelling of sulfur, a good portion of which they contain within themselves.

Besides these flaming and smoking mountains, there are sometimes found other caves and caverns that breathe out great heat but neither flame nor smoke, which is another species of fire, about which the Chronicles of Metallurgy original: "Metallicorum Chronicis" treat more fully, adding, among other things, that sometimes a gap originating in a certain mountain emitted an immense heat, at night showing only some splendor ascending toward the sky, while by day they observed only exhaling heat.

Hence, a curious monk, induced by greed, lowered a copper pot tied to an iron chain into the gap, intending to draw up gold which he believed lay liquefied beneath. When it approached the contact of the fire, it melted immediately and fell off, and he drew back only the chain. Not content with this experiment, he lowered another iron item attached to a very thick iron chain, which likewise burned away like straw along with a good part of the chain, and was ejected upward with great noise and crashing under the appearance of smoke; the monk, however, barely escaped with the danger to his life, leaving the gold in the abyss. But what kind of fire this was that reduced the pot and chain to smoke in the twinkling of an eye—not, of course, a material one, because it was devoid of smoke, but rather an astral one—you will divine without difficulty.