If ever two travelers got more enjoyment out of a day at Vesuvius than did the professor and the deponent, I would like to know how they did it. Of course, there were “specimens” at the bottom of it, as there were in nearly all the ups and downs of that memorable trip. It was “specimens” that led to my being boycotted in the north of Ireland, a short time previous, and it was only fair that they should give me a red letter day of a different sort as an offset to that doleful experience.
“Tomorrow, we may as well do the great ash-pile,” said the professor, reflectively.
We were sitting at a table in a low Neapolitan café, lunching on shell-fish soup and maccheroni, with a bottle of rather sour Capri Blanca as an accompaniment. It was about as low as any café could be, and have any standing at all, only a foot above the level of the bay, and, from a little distance, it seemed to float upon the water, against the stony face of the quay.
The railing of the café, the awning, and the two posts that supported it, made a rustic frame for a grand picture. Straight before us, almost from our feet, stretched the placid waters of the bay, with a ruching of white buildings set all along the shore. In the middle distance, Vesuvius loomed up, like a Giant Grim, a thick volume of white smoke pouring out of his apex and floating off over Monte Somma, which, like a faithful ally, seemed ready to aid and abet the treacherous old volcano in whatever nefarious business he might choose to undertake.
The upper third of Vesuvius was of a dead, uniform gray color, and the lower third, next to the bay, was white with towns, villas, and cultivated fields. The middle third, however, had a black appearance, and from it curious capes and peninsulas ran down into the white belt. Half way between the shore and the volcano’s top, there shone against the black background a little spot of pure white, a building evidently, and the professor said it was the Observatory.
“But what is it that looks so black up there, and runs down so curiously into the white?’’ I demanded next.
“To-morrow you will see,” answered my monitor, significantly, as he arose from the table and reached for his hat.
In those days, the swell way to reach Vesuvius was to take a voiture and pair and drive up to the Observatory in stately grandeur: all well enough for grandés and family parties, but for rough-and-ready tourists, or collectors on the war-path for “ specimens,” it was rather slow. The best way to see natural scenery is to view it afoot, and the next best is to see it from the saddle; an indifferent way is to go in a carriage, and the worst of all is to go by rail. Tourists of today, who are content to be hauled up to the edge of the crater by the mountain rail-way, which has been in operation since 1880, must make up their minds to miss the best part of the whole picnic.
A start in the early morning, and fifteen minutes by rail along the shore of the bay, brought us to the village of Resina, the starting point for all that make the ascent otherwise than by rail. At the station where we alighted, we were met, quite as if by appointment, by a deputation of guides and hangers-on, who straightway escorted us to the bureau des guides. There we signed the articles of war and ordered our equip-ment.
First came an official guide, who engaged with the municipality to bring us back alive, and in as good bodily condition as he found us, for the very moderate consideration of eight lira. Then came a long staff for each of us, and, lastly, the horses we were to ride. They were plump, well-fed little animals, scarcely larger than ponies, and I must do the authorities the justice of recording the fact that they were the most spirited animals I ever saw kept for hire. The little gray rat that I chose would scarcely stand still long enough for me to get my foot into the stir-rup, while the professor’s bay and the guide’s white steed were equally anxious to be off. A moment later we were mounted, staff in hand, in lieu of riding whip, and clattering up the narrow street.
When we started, a piratical hanger-on undertook to sail in our wake by holding to the tail of the professor’s horse as he ran. They were just ahead of me, and the native was running very well, except that his strides were growing dangerously long, when I sang out to my file leader:
“Whip behind!”
The professor glanced backward, let out a reef in his reins, and, as the cavalcade swept suddenly around the next corner, the stern chaser refused to obey his helm, and drove helplessly on, straight toward the stone wall at the farther side of the turn. It was thus the professor started.
Very soon we left the village behind us, and, striking the open country, began to wind our way up a long, narrow lane, full of loose rocks and pebbles, wretchedly rough and toilsome, and barely possible to pass.
Our little horses did their work nobly, how-ever, and we soon saw that our stony lane was only a short cut to something better.
After a mile and a half of slow toiling, we emerged upon a broad, smooth carriage road, and instantly our horses sprang off at a gallop. It was the government road up to the Observatory, winding upward in a most tortuous way, with a straight incline for every curve, and a wall of lava thoughtfully built along its lower side, to prevent accidents.
It is all wrong to let a horse run up hill; but it was of no use trying to hold ours back, for they would run in spite of us. After vainly trying to make my gray rat go slow, I surrendered with a sad sigh, gave him rein enough, and had a wild race with the professor. It was all the fault of those unruly horses, but for a time we went up fairly flying.
We had struck into the black belt soon after reaching the government road, and when, at last, we drew rein to breathe and look about us, we beheld a truly awful scene. It was a glacier of iron (at least, it looked only like iron) many square miles in extent, which had flowed sluggishly down the side of the mountain until it cooled, stiffened, and stood still. Glacier, did I say? That is not a good comparison. There is nothing about it half so regular as the most chaotic glacier the sun ever saw.
On every side, and for a long distance off, the bare, shiny, black lava surrounded us, piled in rugged hills, depressed into great basins, and again heaved upward in huge billows, like a stormy ocean of iron, cooled at the height of its fury. Its surface suggested the writhings and contortions of nature before the world was born. It was chaos come again, incapable of description, incomparable, distracting.
In it all there is not an atom of anything that strikes us as familiar, or belonging to the earth that we are accustomed to; not a shrub, a blade of grass, or even a friendly pebble. It is all from another world, and it could not be more foreign if it had fallen from Saturn. Whether it came from one mile’s depth or a hundred, whether the fires that melted it and cast it up have burned ever since the world was young, or have been lately kindled, we know not. We only know it lies there, just as it stopped in its downward flow, black, grim, and terrible.
Danté and Doré will never know how much they lost by not putting such a scene as this in their “Inferno.” But then, how could they have done it? Not even Danté could have adequately described this awful waste, and, as for the artist, the drawing of such chaotic details would have driven him quite to distraction.
This belt of lava is like the rapids above Niagara, which should always be viewed before the falls themselves. It prepares the mind of the beholder for the contemplation of nature’s grander works, by bringing him face to face with less weighty, yet awe-inspiring evidence of her supreme power.
Winding upward through the miniature mountains of lava, we presently reached the Observatory, at an elevation of 2,080 feet. It is a very substantial, and by no means ugly-looking, stone building, perched on the lower end of a high, sharp ridge, Monte Contaroni, they call it, which runs straight back until it disappears in the ashy side of the volcano. The Observatory is safe, so far as any ordinary flow of lava is concerned; for the current is either divided by the ridge, or deflected down one side or the other. From this point of comparative safety, Professor Palmieri and a corps of trained observers are constantly watching the moods and movements of Vesuvius, and making general meteorological observations as well.
I say “comparative safety,” because, around Vesuvius, it is always the unexpected that happens. Still, the meteorologists stick to their post, even during the troublous times of great eruptions, and thus far there have been no disasters, although during the great disturbance of 1872 their lives were in great danger. So long as the eruptions are not too violent, the observers can observe; but if Vesuvius should decide to get in some of his best work, and throw out a hint to Monte Contaroni in the form of a single mass of rock one hundred and eight feet in circumference and seventeen feet high, like that described by Sir William Hamilton, in 1779, the impression it would make on the inhabitants of the Observatory would be a very painful one.
But all this is parenthetical and very much “by the way.” Ever since we dismounted at the Hermitage, a modest adjunct to the Observatory, at which travelers halt for an omelette, a bottle of wine, and rest for both man and beast, we have been looking back at the picture below. The majesty of the great volcano is entirely forgotten, while we gaze in rapture on the lovely panorama spread out before us.
To my mind, the view from the Hermitage is more charming than that from the top of Vesuvius; for at the former place one is just high enough, and not too high. Yonder is Naples, white as chalk, lying like a crescent of burnished silver around the beautiful bay; the bay itself, calm and placid, like a sheet of frosted silver, set with tiny toy ships; on the left, the plain of Pompeii, and the blue mountains behind Sorrento rising steeply from the shore of the bay; Ischia and Capri in the distance; on our right, level plains, dotted here and there with white hamlets and villas; at our feet, and all around us, grim, black hills and valleys of lava.
Far below, at the foot of the mountain, stands a stone church, with the lava flow just on a level with its eaves.
“Look there!” said the professor. “For once, the Lord has done just what the old Scotch deacon told the lightning-rod peddler He never would do.”
“What was that?”
“‘Hoot mon!’ sezzee; ‘and do you think the Lord’s a-goin’ to dunder on His ain hoose?’”
The roof and the belfry were as good as new, seemingly, and what remained of the walls looked very white against the black field of lava. This church was overwhelmed during the eruption of 1872, so the guide said, which also destroyed two villages, Massa and San Sebastiano, and many lives.
Familiarity breeds contempt, even for a volcano in good running order. With that church spire before their very eyes, looming up above the lava, like a mournful danger signal, the people below live on in their fool’s paradise, and build their villages, and cultivate their vineyards up to the very edge of the lava belt. They forget, or seem to forget, that Vesuvius has ways of his own for punishing such impertinence. Pompeii was buried, with neatness and dispatch, under twenty feet of pumice stone, ashes, and scoria. The flourishing and populous village of Resina now stands ninety feet abore old Herculaneum, which was buried under a torrent of mud. Torre del Greco, only seven miles from Naples, has been destroyed and rebuilt four or five times, and yet its population today is in the neighborhood of 20,000. People forget that the elder Pliny was suffocated by sulphurous gas, as far away as the shore of the bay.
The bill of fare served up by Vesuvius offers variety enough to suit the taste of the most fastidious. It includes hot water and mud for the first course; sand, stones, ashes, scoria, lava to order, and hashed pumice stone for the intermediate courses; with fire, smoke, earthquakes, and sulphurous vapor by way of dessert.
The carriage road ends at the Hermitage, and for the rest of the way there is only a rugged pathway over the lava beds. We mounted our horses once more, and rode along the top of the Observatory ridge until we reached the upper end, close to the well-known Atrio del Carallo, between Somma and Vesuvius, where we turned off abruptly to the right, and rode toward the foot of the cone. Up and down, around and about, the rough pathway led us, over sheets of lava and great beds of ashes, until, after three-quarters of an hour from the Hermitage, we reached the foot of the cone, at the point of ascent. Dismounting, we gave our horses in charge of some myrmidons of the bureau des guiles. and prepared to climb.
Immediately upon alighting, we were beset by a mob of enterprising natives, who very kindly offered to carry our royal highnesses in sedan chairs up to the summit for a mere trifle — about ten dollars each, I think it was. The chairs were there, but the professor would not put up the money.
“No, my friends,” said he, suavely, addressing the whole company; “this part of the pilgrimage must be made on foot. I’m sorry I can’t take you all with me; but the best of friends must part. Young man, my friends say that climbing mountains is one of the few things I can do well; so goodbye for the present; I’ll wait for you at the top.”
A boast that is made in the face of a trial is entitled to respect. But the professor forgot the practice I had just been having in the cathedral spires of Europe; and, thanks to that, I was able to keep step with the procession.
When you start to climb up the cone, you realize that the slope is about forty degrees, but by the time you are a third of the way up, it seems more like eighty. It is nothing more nor less than climbing a conical ash-pile eighteen hundred feet high, and very steep. At every step, you sink into the loose, dry ashes six inches, and slip back six more; so that the distance gained amounts to about the same as the distance lost.
It is very laborious work, and painfully slow. I would rather husk corn in cold weather with chapped hands, than climb Vesuvius every day, as these guides do.
Seeing that we were laboring hard, the sedan-charioteers hastened up to us, and tried hard to entrap us into displaying signals of distress. One of them got directly in front of me, and dangled the end of a strap within a few inches of my hand, hoping I would be tempted to take hold of it and be pulled up, for a consideration to be named at the top.
“Get thee behind me!” I cried out to my tempter, very resolutely.
He obeyed me instantly. He got behind me, put his hand against the small of my back, and began to push me ahead of him. This was too much, and I told him so.
Half way up the steep, we came to a hole in the ashes, and a native in it, shivering in the chilly wind that swept across the face of the mountain.
“Well, what’s to pay this time?” queried the professor.
“Wine, gentlemen; wine off Vesuvio,” cried the shivering one from the pit, holding up a bottle of dark-colored liquid and a tumbler.
“Well, well! If such enterprise as this don’t meet with success, where is the reward of industry?”
“Verra good wine, gentlemen,” said the guide. “ Wine make on ze side off Vesuvio. He name called Lachryme Christi.”
The professor bought it, the cork was drawn, and he handed me a tumblerful of liquid from the bottle.
“There, young man, you drink that; and if it don’t throw you into convulsions, I’ll have some.”
I put it to my lips and began to drink. It was as sour as vinegar, and about as astringent as a salt and alum bath; but I was thirsty, and it went down.
“Is it really good?” asked the professor, with sudden interest.
“Good? You just try it!” I answered, assuringly.
He drank off half a tumblerful without tasting it, as a man sometimes swallows carbolic acid by mistake, and then he paused to taste.
“Good!” he echoed, with a very black and pursed-up scowl at me. “That was bottled at a tan-yard, and it’s nothing but pure tannin! Oh, my dyspepsia! Let us leave this fatal spot.”
Staff in hand, we struggled on. Chilly clouds swept by from the north and enveloped us in their misty folds, while they blotted out from view the whole of the lower world, from our feet downward. At times I could not see my companions twenty yards below me.
Fifty minutes from the foot of the cone found us at the top, standing on the narrow rim of the crater. Although the rim was nowhere more than fifteen feet wide, it was perfectly firm, and at the edge the bare rocks cropped out. At our feet yawned a great circular abyss, nearly a thousand feet across, a bottomless pit in reality, from which there rolled upward unceasingly a great volume of steamy-white vapor.
“Leesten!” said the guide. “Hear ze fire.”
We listened. Far below, from whence the vapor came, we could hear the flames of subterranean fire rolling and surging against the red-hot walls, as we had often heard the ocean’s waves dashing against rocky cliffs. Now and then, we heard masses of rock fall from the walls and dash to pieces, the fragments of which kept rattling for some seconds afterward. We stood at the gateway to the regions of Pluto, and could have entered by a single bound. But where is the would-be suicide bold enough to take just one step beyond the spot on which we stood?
The rim of the crater was rather irregular in outline, its highest point being on the southern side, from which it rapidly sloped away toward the north. For some years prior to 1872, the circular rim was unbroken; but, during the eruption of that year, the whole crater filled with molten lava, which finally caused a terrific explosion at the weakest point, as the whole north side was blown out. Through the great gap thus formed, twice a stone’s throw in width at the top and about ninety feet deep, the lava poured out and ran down the side of the cone toward the Observatory. We can but faintly imagine the tremendous force that was required to burst through a wall of solid rock forty feet thick!
From the bottom of this notch, a shelf of lava, covered with ashes, sulphur, and scoria, extended, like a diaphragm, across the crater for nearly half its width, until it ended abruptly at the fiery pit on the north side. The walls of the crater were rugged precipices of bare rock, cracked and seamed by previous convulsions, yellow with sulphur in varying tints, while jets of steam issued from the cracks.
The professor is an experienced geologist, and, therefore, of a very inquiring turn of mind, especially when amongst rocks. It cropped out then and there, on the top of Vesuvius, in a way that was rather startling. I shudder even now, as I recall it, and think what a scrape it might have got us into. I think of the professor as a bold, bad man to travel with, and myself I regard as a fool of the same type as the sheep that jumps over a precipice because his leader does.
We walked down to the notch where the rim of the crater ended in a rocky steep, and wished we could only get down to that shelf, and actually into the crater. We wondered if there was an impassable chasm at the foot of our precipice; we speculated, calculated, and rolled big stones down to test the matter. Finally, one of the stones rolled in sight at the bottom. We argued the question briefly, but finally agreed. The guide had stopped some distance above, and was sitting down like a Turk, chewing the cud of reflection, while he waited for us to look to our heart’s content, and then come back to him. In point of fact, he had expressly enjoined us not to go below the spot where he sat.
We saw that he was paying no attention to us. The geologist said he could do it if I could; and I told him I would if he would go first. That settled it. We mapped out a line of descent as far down as we could see, slipped off our overcoats, and swung off, the professor leading the way.
“Now, be careful, young man, and don’t loosen any rock that would roll down on me; it would be unpleasant, and might cause a coolness between us.”
It was a matter of cool head, careful eye, steady foot, and firm hand. The professor glided like a lizard backward and forward across the face of the precipice, in zigzag lines, but always going down. I would not have led the way for a decoration; but following a man who knew what he was about was a different thing.
Before the guide awoke to the situation, we were half way down. Then he hurried to the notch, and came as far down as he dared, shouting and gesticulating, and endeavoring to scare us off our footing by the assurance that what we were doing was “verra dangereuse!”
But we were giving our undivided attention to the business in hand, and had no breath to waste on him. We reached the tug of war, passed it safely, and presently stood in the bottom of the notch. As we looked up at the wall, nearly, if not quite, a hundred feet high, the route we had traversed seemed utterly impracticable.
After a few hasty glances about us, we immediately started in toward the center of the crater. And the guide far above us raved and almost tore his hair. His wailing in broken English and swear words in good Italian are even yet ringing in my ears. He said again, it was “verra dangereuse,” and, much more, not all to our credit; but the professor only shouted back to him, in choice French, the assurance that we knew what we were about, and kept bravely on. The crust was very thin in those days, and visitors were prohibited from going upon it until it thickened and became really safe.
“Keep close to the big rocks!” shouted the professor, over his shoulder. “If the lava will bear them, it will bear us.”
On he went, and although, by that time, I would not have gone alone, or gone first, for a round million, I followed, over beds of yellow sulphur, so hot we could not hold it in our hands, and across many a crevice, from which the hot, sulphurous vapor poured upward. We went over one long stretch of clean lava, where the thin crust rumbled at every step we took, and we stepped very gingerly, too, I assure you. It gave me the queerest feeling, and the most of it, I ever felt in my life.
My leader actually had the nerve to go up to the edge of the lava shelf upon which we were standing and look over into that bottomless pit of fire and brimstone! I didn’t. My passport had not been viséed, and, besides that, I wasn’t ready. Talk about coolness and nerve! No wonder the poor guide was struck dumb, and gave us up as not worth worrying over. In truth, at the climax of the professor’s audacity, he never uttered a word of protest, at least not in our hearing.
It is needless to say that the center of the crater was a sublime and awful place. We could distinctly feel the surge of the fiery waves beneath our feet, and the hot spray that came up from them. In front of us was the great pit; behind us, the immense V-shaped notch; around us loomed up the yellow walls, cracked, seamed, and steaming at every pore; while far above all circled the ragged rim of the crater.
On the way out, I filled every pocket I had with chunks of sulphur; and, in the course of my search for shapely specimens, I found, last of all expected things, a dead quail, lying on the lava. It had been dead some time; and, although its under side was quite decomposed, it had no odor. How it ever got into the crater is a mystery, for Vesuvius is over four thousand feet high, and quails have no business to go up there, save in tourists’ lunch baskets.
With a last, long look inward, we passed out at the notch, and were ready to descend. We climbed up the western face of the cone, but we were then on the north side, next to Monte Somma; and, in order to reach the horses, it was necessary to swing a quarter way round.
The descent was where the fun came in. Like experienced mariners, we planned to make all our longitude near the top, where the degrees were shortest; and, leaving our guide to bring our overcoats, we started. The start was all that was necessary; for, from that point, our progress rivaled that of the Flying Dutchman. If we did not actually fly, we came as near it as human beings ever did. At every stride we stepped four feet and slid four more, sinking knee deep in the loose scoria, plowing it up and sending it rolling and rattling down in a great sheet, thirty feet wide.
We ran in spite of ourselves, slanting downward toward the horses, and a wilder race I never ran. We went at such a terrific pace it made our heads swim, and it took sharp work to keep from pitching headlong down the side of the cone. At times it seemed as though some of my limbs would surely fly off into space.
The descent was accomplished in about four minutes, Observatory time, and the track we left around the side of the cone would be a puzzle to future geologists, if it could only be preserved. Fatigued and breathless, we sat down by the horses to rest and empty about a quart of lava out of each of our shoes.
In a few moments more our guide swooped down upon us, “breathing strange oaths,” as well as bad words we had heard before. He was as mad a man as I ever saw. Shaking his fist at us, he declared we were not gentlemen, but ruffians, to disobey him so, and even defy him, and he should report our conduct to the authorities. He said that if either of us had been lost in the crater, he would have been imprisoned, and, in a truly Italian manner, he held his hand before his face and glared at us between his fingers, in suggestion of prison bars.
As soon as the guide opened fire on us, the professor started in to argue the case with him on its merits, and from that moment I knew his opponent’s doom was sealed. I believe he could argue a burglar out of his house empty-handed, if he could once get a discussion started. In less than five minutes, the guide was convinced that we had not only done quite the proper thing, but would have been very foolish had we done otherwise. His final surrender was so unconditional as to excite surprise in all the bystanders, save one. As for him, he had had experience, and knew what to expect.
Mounting our horses, we rode back down the mountain to Resina, tired enough, but well satisfied. Thus ended our ups and downs at Vesuvius: and may his shadow never grow less. With the geologist to lead the way, I would willingly risk my neck in the crater again tomorrow.
