es and cinders, the melted lava burrows out, twisting and twirling
like an enormous fiery earth-worm, till it gets to the air outside, and
runs off down the mountain in a stream of fire. And so you may see (as
are to be seen on Vesuvius now) two eruptions at once--one of burning
stones above, and one of melted lava below.

And what is lava?

That, I think, I must tell you another time. For when I speak of it I
shall have to tell you more about Madam How, and her ways of making the
ground on which you stand, than I can say just now. But if you want to
know (as I dare say you do) what the eruption of a volcano is like, you
may read what follows. I did not see it happen; for I never had the good
fortune of seeing a mountain burning, though I have seen many and many a
one which has been burnt--extinct volcanos, as they are called.

The man who saw it--a very good friend of mine, and a very good man of
science also--went last year to see an eruption on Vesuvius, not from the
main crater, but from a small one which had risen up suddenly on the
outside of it; and he gave me leave (when I told him that I was writing
for children) to tell them what he saw.

This new cone, he said, was about 200 feet high, and perhaps 80 or 100
feet across at the top. And as he stood below it (it was not safe to go
up it) smoke rolled up from its top, "rosy pink below," from the glare of
the caldron, and above "faint greenish or blueish silver of indescribable
beauty, from the light of the moon." But more--By good chance, the cone
began to send out, not smoke only, but brilliant burning stones. "Each
explosion," he says, "was like a vast girandole of rockets, with a noise
(such as rockets would make) like the waves on a beach, or the wind
blowing through shrouds. The mountain was trembling the whole time. So
it went on for two hours and more; sometimes eight or ten explosions in a
minute, and more than 1000 stones in each, some as large as two bricks
end to end. The largest ones mostly fell back into the crater; but the
smaller ones being thrown higher, and more acted on by the wind, fell in
immense numbers on the leeward slope of the cone" (of course, making it
bigger and bigger, as I have explained already to you), and of course, as
they were intensely hot and bright, making the cone look as if it too was
red-hot. But it was not so, he says, really. The colour of the stones
was rather "golden, and they spotted the black cone over