wind brought the hot blast in our faces. I Was content to remain in one place, watching a phase of nature’s mountain-building that was at once beautiful and dreadful to see. But as the flow has no certainty of movement, and we could not rely on its leaving a solid footing under us from one moment to another, we cautiously retreated. When we had made our way back, I found the soles of my shoes were burned.
From the station I gazed back on-the fiery streams forming a long line of moving red, and sending up a quivering veil of thin, flaming light, that met, high up, the cool darkness of the sky, with its setting of tranquil stars.
When, by day, I went out to study the lava-fields in the Atrio del Cavallo, I worked from the vantage-point of a heaped-up pile of rugged boulders. Two feet below the crust, the interior was at red heat, and I Sat in the cold January wind over a pleasant, comfortable warmth. But to sit over volcanic fires is not the most tranquilizing of experiences, and involuntarily I glanced down now and again. Always I could hear the cracking, with dull thuds, as of thick ice breaking. My guide once jumped to his feet as a new stream burst out not twenty yards away. Having reassured himself that the seam was not extending our way, and that there was no immediate danger, he reseated himself, saying, “It is nothing; but he works hard to-day.”
The lava-fields are among the most extraordinary of Vesuvian phenomena. Rock heaped upon rock,—not ordinary stone, but boulders such as might be made by fusing iron with coal refuse and glass,—rough, jagged rocks armed with teeth and claws and seamed with fire, scoriated, petrified streams, masses of matter resembling a monster’s wrinkled hide, fantastic shapes, they lie jammed together by an irresistible force, twisted, thrown one against another in nightmare confusion.
The vast extent of stony acres under the bright sunlight is blackish gray in color, bare, monotonous, and desolate. At evening the sun gave it a tone of old copper, and the light, gradually fading, left it a dull bronze, deepening in tone until the night infolded it in gloom. Early in the morning, as one looked at it from the observatory, with the sun rising behind the mountain, it had the blue of a plum. It was wonderfully changeable in color, variously affected by every shifting angle of sunlight.
One night at the station the unkind winds brought sulphurous vapors from the crater and from the crevices in the side. The cinders blew against the windows and in between the shutters, playing a rattling tattoo to the accompaniment of the wind’s dreary whistling. The sickening gases penetrated my room, and I covered my face with dampened towels to breathe easily, sitting in the blackness and wondering what other strange and untoward things would happen. In the morning the station area lay under several inches of powdery ashes.
Each successive visit to the crater deepened the feeling of awe with which I had come to regard that bellowing entrance to Inferno. Each day I could get different glimpses into the seething pit, but one day was like another in the fiendish din and smell of it all. I was glad indeed to turn my back upon it, on my last ride down the giddy slope of the Funicular, where it ever seemed as though the rocks below were flying up to smite me in the face. I made one last journey around by the devious paths to the crevices in the side. The blue walls of Monte Somma loomed through the rolling white steam-clouds that rounded up through the giant cracks. These crevices slant at a sharp angle in an almost straight line, bordered by the roughly tumbled lava upon which I stood, colored in brilliant yellows and various reds and blacks. I could not see the side beyond the constantly swelling steam, nor approach within ten yards for the evil smell of the place; and after noting the color-effect in a hasty sketch, I withdrew to a more healthful neighborhood.
For two days the carriage-road had been blocked along almost the whole of its length by the encroaching lava. In order to reach the observatory, near which I remained the last three nights, I was forced to make the intervening mile and a half over the new hot lava, crossing one live stream. At this point it was considerably surface-cooled, but still glowing, and broken into loose fragments and boulders that rolled along underfoot. It was quick work and sure stepping, cool head and hot feet. Glad I was to reach the remnant of good road at the end, hewn out of solid lava, and so find myself at the little house where I was to stay. A buxom matron
LXIX.—70
