heir spindle or distaff, or meditating in grim solitude, sit
with the sinister set features of Fates by their doorways. The young
people are very rarely seen to smile: they open hard, black, beaded
eyes upon a world in which there is little for them but endurance or
the fierceness of passions that delight in blood. Strangely
different are these dwellers on the sides of Etna from the voluble,
lithe sailors of Sciacca or Mazara, with their sunburnt skins and
many-coloured garments.

The Val del Bove--a vast chasm in the flank of Etna, where the very
heart of the volcano has been riven and its entrails bared--is the
most impressive spot of all this region. The road to it leads from
Zafferana (so called because of its crocus-flowers) along what looks
like a series of black moraines, where the lava torrents pouring
from the craters of Etna have spread out, and reared themselves in
stiffened ridges against opposing mountain buttresses. After toiling
for about three hours over the dismal waste, a point between the
native rock of Etna and the dead sea of lava is reached, which
commands a prospect of the cone with its curling smoke surmounting a
caldron of some four thousand feet in depth and seemingly very wide.
The whole of this space is filled with billows of blackness, wave on
wave, crest over crest, and dyke by dyke, precisely similar to a
gigantic glacier, swarthy and immovable. The resemblance of the lava
flood to a glacier is extraordinarily striking. One can fancy
oneself standing on the Belvedere at Macugnaga, or the Tacul point
upon the Mer de Glace, in some nightmare, and finding to one's
horror that the radiant snows and river-breeding ice-fields have
been turned by a malignant deity to sullen, stationary cinders. It
is a most hideous place, like a pit in Dante's Hell, disused for
some unexplained reason, and left untenanted by fiends. The scenery
of the moon, without atmosphere and without life, must be of this
sort; and such, rolling round in space, may be some planet that has
survived its own combustion. When the clouds, which almost always
hang about the Val del Bove, are tumbling at their awful play around
its precipices, veiling the sweet suggestion of distant sea and
happier hills that should be visible, the horror of this view is
aggravated. Breaking here and there, the billows of mist disclose
forlorn tracts of jet-black desolation, wicked, unutterable, hateful
in their hideousness, with patches of smutty