"Cui Eremita-fæminis Commune quid cum monachis? Nec te nec ullam aliam Admittemus in casulam." “Then quoth the Hermit,' What have you You change no stocking in the cell Where I in holy quiet dwell.'" Still, as the "pressure from without" grew more intense, and the throng of tourists from below came more "fast and furious," we may further imagine the Solitary giving up the strife, and seeking a safer retreat for his asceticism in some distant Calabrian wilderness, leaving the Hermitage and its desecrated "stazioni" to fall to the present "vile uses" of a rude banquet-house and wine-shop, where the jolly, or quasijolly host stands by his "bill" more stoutly than others by "their order," and will not bate a maravedie of his charge for wine growing worse and dearer every day. The "generous" and "cheering" qualities of the famed "Lachryma Christi" are now but matters of history. You get at the Hermitage a sweetish, perry-ish wine, very grateful after toil, but by no means of that overpowering strength which, as they tell you, used to make "cheeks glow" and "the eye sparkle" after a single glass.* 66 At the Hermitage, those who are for the mountain leave those who are afraid to venture further; and here, under strict promise to poor distant mamma not to allow the girls on any account to fatigue themselves," I issued a tyrannic mandate that they should get out drawingbooks, and amuse themselves as they best might, while we took the upward road in all the superiority of masculine strength. Poor things! they uttered no demur, though their eyes spoke intelligibly disappointment and daring mixed. They asked, "just for information sake," a few leading questions as to the "chairs" which were lying about, which the "porteurs" were too happy to answer with true Italian volubility. Then they invited the signoras to "seat themselves," and prove "how easy they were," "how strong," "how light," "how safe," and so on. In this state of hint and hesitation-our military friend of course seconding the object of the ladies-up whirled a carriage with another party; and when I saw a young girl, certainly not stronger-looking than either of mine, preparing for the upward road, I could hold out no longer. "Andiamo" was the word; in a few minutes we were off for the "Atria di * Dr. Moore, in his "Tour in Italy," gives a verse in praise of this wine (vol. ii. p. 217), which he has translated so prosaically and imperfectly, that I am tempted to offer a version: Chi fu ne contadini il piu indiscreto, Che à sbigottir la gente Diede nome dolente Al' vin che sopra ogn'altro il cuor fà lieto? Lachrima dunque appellarsi un' rise Parto di nobilissima vindemia. What undiscerning clown was he Who first applied that doleful name A bugbear to good companie To wine which warms the heart like flame? A smile were fitter word than tear For what our generous grape gives here.-R. Cavallo;" and even then the beaming delight of their countenances amply repaid me for yielding. Now that I know what the adventure is, I would pronounce that, except for an absolute invalid, it is what Mr. Stephenson declares a tunnel through the globe to be-"just a question of-expense!"-of the four piastres, or sixteen shillings each, extra cost in the expedition. Both the Hermitage, and a stately Royal Observatory a little higher up, stand on a spur or promontory of Vesuvius, and both, I should say, quite safe from the course of any eruption, except one which would upheave the whole mountain from its base. These buildings may be insulated within a fiery cordon by a junction of lava-torrents flowing round them, when the atmosphere would be intolerable to any except the "Fire King;" but overwhelmed they can scarcely be, inasmuch as ravines at each side offer escape-courses for a substance which, however sluggishly, as its general law conforms to that of gravitation. The "Fossa Grande" is the hollow way in which the lava usually engulphs itself, and mingles with the older lavas lying in wild sterile confusion over a large tract at the bottom of the ravine, at about the middle band of the mountain. This tract, once cultivated, fertile, and populous, has now but a church-tower, or lava-girt villa or so, standing out in the desolation, like masts of a submerged vessel, to tell of the wreck below, and seems to be abandoned as the waste-ground for discharging the slag and fiery torrent of the volcano into it. None of the modern eruptions have sent their lava-streams below this region-some not even so far; the eruption of 1638, which consumed a former Resina, appears to have been the last which poured its destroying agency down on the sea-coast band of Vesuvius. As you pass from the Observatory onwards over the "Atria di Cavallo" (a level, of which more presently) to the base of Vesuvius Proper, your course lies through and over great beds of lava, lying as they cooled, of different shades of brown, and resembling, in colour and seeming consistence, the peat of an Irish bog, more than any substance I know. Of the eruptions of the present century, that of 1822 seems to have been most extensive: the varieties of shapes in which the impelling forces have left these cooling masses are grotesque and innumerable. The guides called our attention to one named "Il Mantello," which bore in its graceful folds no remote resemblance to the sculptured draperies of the bronze statues in the Museo Borbonico; further on lay two huge heaps of what might be taken for coils of rope, tarred and ready to unrol for rigging a ship; and again, a third lay lapped over in folds not unlike those of an antediluvian rhinoceros hide. All these fantastic shapes alike denoted their origin in the irresistible impulse given by the lava-stores of the mountain in action, as they pushed and drove before them the cooling mass of previously ejected matter, which as visibly expressed its reluctance to "move on" in the writhings and contortions everywhere marking its downward progress. A half hour's ride through this scene brought us to the foot of the cone, where the horses are left, and gentlemen surrender themselves to the guidance of centaurs, or man-horses, as we termed them, while ladies arrange themselves in the "chaises à porteur," or shoulder chairs, in which they make the ascent. While all this is preparing, I take the opportunity to give a geological look around me, and having done so, to confess some mistaken ideas I had hitherto retained through all my studies of volcanic action-mistakes, perhaps, inseparable from studying natural phenomena by book only-and yet I may possibly render a service to readers who have never seen the actual phenomena described, by being as unlearned as possible in my remarks, for it is, I fear, a common fault of scientific writers to "fire over their readers' heads!"—to forget in their own superior attainments the ignorance of others--and hence to write in a style so learnedly unintelligible as to convey no sense or meaning to those who, having to "begin at the beginning," need a very elementary treatise. And first, of "error the first." I had always pictured to myself Vesuvius in eruption as something like a huge caldron full of ingredients, which, when fused by intense heat to a boiling point, at last rose and ran over the edge of the crater, and flowed down the conical sides in the form of lava-constantly adding to the size of the mountain by successive coats of the semi-fluid matter, deposited in layers, like the coats of an onion. This is not at all according to the facts—at least, the ordinary facts-of volcanic action: the lava never, that I could learn (and I questioned our intelligent head guide, Signor Pasquale, of Resina, closely on this point), breaks over the top, but ever from some vent or weak point in the side of the cone, which is, as it were, burst out by the violent internal action. The present peak of Vesuvius, which is about 2000 feet high, is a regular cone all round, and does not contain on its surface a single particle of flowed lava; it seems all composed of darkcoloured slags, or cinders, furrowed into a thousand small ravines by the action of rains or weather. This surface presents a curious contrast, something like those tragi-comic masques which smile at one side of the face and frown or cry at the other. Towards Naples and the sea, whence the prevailing winds blow, it is dark, frowning, and rugged; towards the Campagna and Capua, it presents one smooth regular sheet of that singular, granular light matériel called ashes, and which formed the winding-sheet in which Pompeii and its treasures lay buried and preserved for nigh 1800 years. This Vesuvian ashes is a very peculiar substance it is granular, and no amount of rain will make it into mud; of a dark-grey colour naturally, when exposed to the air it becomes white as sea sand; I know nothing that it resembles more than the grey earth used in foundries for making moulds for the castings; and this comparison, drawn from the smelting-house, suggests another, which, to such of my readers as may have seen the process of "running a casting," will (parvis componere magna) give a correct familiar idea of how the lava does flow from the mountain. In a foundry, the great vessel of molten metal has a small vent at the bottom usually closed by some fire-proof clay. This plug is broken by an iron instrument from without whenever a casting is required, and closed again with the same material after a sufficient supply of the molten stream has been run off. Now, let the reader suppose this process carried out on the immense scale where a hollow mountain is the vessel, and that the force which breaks through is furnished from the furnace fires within, while the whole operation is preceded by the throes, and thunders, and jets, and volleys from the top, which give signal that the volcano is getting up its steam," which at last forces out some flawed part of the mountain and breaks through everything, and he may have some real idea of the forces with which a volcano 66 works, and their direction. According to the guide, an eruption never takes place without a tremblement de terre, of more or less violence, and also a failure of water in the numberless wells, with which the whole region of garden-ground between Naples and Vesuvius is dotted; it is reasonable to conclude that the water thus subducted from the wells of Naples is drawn in by some subterranean ducts to feed the huge boiler cavern, whose steam action in shaking the mountain tries its weak points, and ultimately bursts out one or more of them. When in the eruption of 1631, before referred to, seven distinct streams of lava discharged themselves from as many orifices upon the devoted region beneath, the sight would have been, for any one who dared to look (and forget Pliny), one of awful magnificence. A second misconception which I have to acknowledge, but which a single survey of the locality at once corrected, is the supposition that the present Vesuvius is the same mountain which 1800 years since destroyed those doomed "cities of the plain," Herculaneum and Pompeii. This seems to me a fallacy which can scarce survive a personal inspection for one instant. Vesuvius, as it now stands, rises within the area of the old used out mountain, at one side of a great plain amphitheatre, the "Atria di Cavallo," while Monte Somna, which rises and circles this plain on the north and north-east sides, is plainly the shell or crust of the original mountain, the great mass of which was blown out and precipitated on the country beneath to the west and south-west in the first recorded convulsion of A.D. 79, after the premonitory earthquake of A.D. 63. Up to that time the mountain would seem to have formed a green and graceful background to the cordon of luxurious cities which gemmed the margin of the beautiful bay beneath; and we may take its character from the contemporary epigram of Martial, of which (not having the fear of Mr. Addison or other traditors before my eyes) I scratched a version while sitting among the cinders and ashes of Vesuvius as it now lies changed and ruined: Hic est Pampineis viridis modo Vesuvius umbris, Cuncta jacent flammis, et tristi mersa favilla, MART. lib. i. 124. Here! where Vesuvius, crowned with leafy vine, It is impossible, in my judgment, to look at Monte Somna, with its trap-dykes standing out from the surface of its scarped and wall-like sides, without at once adopting the conviction that it is but the remains of the funnel of that older volcano, which carried away the remainder of its furnace-shaft when it burst forth on the level country below, while the “Atria di Cavallo" may be likened to a flooring over a vault of fire and combustibles beneath, similar to that which actually reverberates to a heavy stamp in the Solfa-terra, at the opposite side of the bay. This idea, when once received, gives an astounding impression of the magnitude of the scale on which volcanic action may have formerly prevailed in this region; nay, when on ascending the cone, the eye can take in the level country to the eastward as far as Capua and Caserta, the conception of volcanic agency expands itself still further, and suggests that the distant ranges of hills which bound the "Campagna felice" are but the old walls of extinct volcanoes, and that the "happy land" itself may be but the flooring over gulfs of billowing molten fire, or combustibles waiting the explosive agency at unknown depths beneath ;-the conception is a tremendous one to grasp, but the analogies of volcanic action bring it within the scope of prob., no-of possibility. Another fact, portentous to consider, is the sympathy said to exist between Vesuvius and the volcanic region twenty miles off, at the other side of the bay. Solfa-terra, already alluded to, a perfect unbroken crater, never known to have exploded, within the historic era, has yet a constant, subdued volcanic action going on, in jets and puffs of sulphuric and aluminous gases from the chinks and crevices of its floor and sides; but it has been observed, that the moment an eruption of Vesuvius commences, the Solfa-terra becomes quiet until it is ended, when it recommences its own volcanic operations again. These tokens of subterranean correspondence suggest the idea that a day may come when Naples will find itself in the situation of, exposure to two fires, and may wish that its tutelar Saint Januarius were a "Janus bifrons," that he might extinguish a fire before and behind by "the mere view of his divine head!" for so runs the legend commemorating his former interposition between the city and the flaming mountains. But à route!—our "porteurs" are ready, our centaurs pawing the ashes impatiently. We fastened the ladies by shawls and cloaks into slight rush-bottomed arm-chairs, constructed, I believe intentionally, with loose joints, on the principle of a ship-lantern, so that the occupant may preserve a perpendicular at whatever angle of elevation the bearers carry the bearing-poles, to which they are attached by strong grass ropes; the whole equipage is very primitive, but, as we found it, sufficiently serviceable. For us gentlemen the preparations were different, but equally simple. We each selected at will what we called, centaurs, or man-horses, from a If the Solfa-terra roared as loud as Bully Bottom boasted he could, and as other volcanic lions do, so as to put the auditors in "pity of their life," it would enforce more attention to its real wonders. I am wrong in saying there is no eruption on record, for a (not very clear) tradition affirms one to have taken place in the end of the twelfth century (1198); and I think it impossible any one can ever cross its area without feeling that an explosion may any day happen. You cannot stamp on the ground without being sensible that you are on the roof of an abyss, and when you arrive at the centre of the amphitheatre, and the guide, taking a mass of rock, flings it forcibly on the floor, the perceptible shaking of the ground, and the deep hollow sound with which the echoes roll away through the "vast profound" beneath, produce a curious sensation of insecurity. Proceeding a little further, you find jets of sulphuric and aluminous gases puffing from the ground with great activity; so that on the whole I think the visitor must depart with an impression of vast volcanic stores lying beneath him, only waiting the necessary chemical combinations to make a sensation "with a witness." |