The ascent is easy at first between walls and the vineyards which produce the celebrated Lachryma Christi.After a half hour we reached and began to cross the lava of 1858, and the wild desolation and gloom of the mountain began to strike us.One is here conscious of the titanic forces at work.Sometimes it is as if a giant had ploughed the ground, and left the furrows without harrowing them to harden into black and brown stone.We could see again how the broad stream, flowing down, squeezed and squashed like mud, had taken all fantastic shapes,--now like gnarled tree roots; now like serpents in a coil; here the human form, or a part of it,--a torso or a limb,--in agony; now in other nameless convolutions and contortions, as if heaved up and twisted in fiery pain and suffering,--for there was almost a human feeling in it; and again not unlike stone billows.We could see how the cooling crust had been lifted and split and turned over by the hot stream underneath, which, continually oozing from the rent of the eruption, bore it down and pressed it upward.Even so low as the point where we crossed the lava of 1858 were fissures whence came hot air.
An hour brought us to the resting-place called the Hermitage, an osteria and observatory established by the government.Standing upon the end of a spur, it seems to be safe from the lava, whose course has always been on either side; but it must be an uncomfortable place in a shower of stones and ashes.We rode half an hour longer on horseback, on a nearly level path, to the foot of the steep ascent, the base of the great crater.This ride gave us completely the wide and ghastly desolation of the mountain, the ruin that the lava has wrought upon slopes that were once green with vine and olive, and busy with the hum of life.This black, contorted desert waste is more sterile and hopeless than any mountain of stone, because the idea of relentless destruction is involved here.This great hummocked, sloping plain, ridged and seamed, was all about us, without cheer or relaxation of grim solitude.Before us rose, as black and bare, what the guides call the mountain, and which used to be the crater.Up one side is worked in the lava a zigzag path, steep, but not very fatiguing, if you take it slowly.Two thirds of the way up, I saw specks of people climbing.Beyond it rose the cone of ashes, out of which the great cloud of sulphurous smoke rises and rolls night and day now.On the very edge of that, on the lip of it, where the smoke rose, I also saw human shapes; and it seemed as if they stood on the brink of Tartarus and in momently imminent peril.
We left our horses in a wild spot, where scorched boulders had fallen upon the lava bed; and guides and boys gathered about us like cormorants: but, declining their offers to pull us up, we began the ascent, which took about three quarters of an hour.We were then on the summit, which is, after all, not a summit at all, but an uneven waste, sloping away from the Cone in the center.This sloping lava waste was full of little cracks,--not fissures with hot lava in them, or anything of the sort,--out of which white steam issued, not unlike the smoke from a great patch of burned timber; and the wind blew it along the ground towards us.It was cool, for the sun was hidden by light clouds, but not cold.The ground under foot was slightly warm.
I had expected to feel some dread, or shrinking, or at least some sense of insecurity, but I did not the slightest, then or afterwards;and I think mine is the usual experience.I had no more sense of danger on the edge of the crater than I had in the streets of Naples.
We next addressed ourselves to the Cone, which is a loose hill of ashes and sand,--a natural slope, I should say, of about one and a half to one, offering no foothold.The climb is very fatiguing, because you sink in to the ankles, and slide back at every step; but it is short,--we were up in six to eight minutes,--though the ladies, who had been helped a little by the guides, were nearly exhausted, and sank down on the very edge of the crater, with their backs to the smoke.What did we see? What would you see if you looked into a steam boiler? We stood on the ashy edge of the crater, the sharp edge sloping one way down the mountain, and the other into the bowels, whence the thick, stifling smoke rose.We rolled stones down, and heard them rumbling for half a minute.The diameter of the crater on the brink of which we stood was said to be an eighth of a mile; but the whole was completely filled with vapor.The edge where we stood was quite warm.
We ate some rolls we had brought in our pockets, and some of the party tried a bottle of the wine that one of the cormorants had brought up, but found it anything but the Lachryma Christi it was named.We looked with longing eyes down into the vapor-boiling caldron; we looked at the wide and lovely view of land and sea; we tried to realize our awful situation, munched our dry bread, and laughed at the monstrous demands of the vagabonds about us for money, and then turned and went down quicker than we came up.
