A VOICE FROM THE PIT

"Signor, we are arrived," whispered the old man in my ear; and he put out
a sudden cold hand, corded like melon rind, to stay me in the stumbling
darkness.

We were on a tilted table-land of the mountain; and, looking forth and
below, the far indigo crescent of the bay, where it swept towards
Castellamare, seemed to rise up at me, as if it were a perpendicular
wall, across which the white crests of the waves flew like ghost moths.

We skirted a boulder, and came upon a field of sleek purple lava sown all
over with little lemon jets of silent smoke, which in their wan and
melancholy glow might have been the corpse lights of those innumerable
dead whose tombstone was the mountain itself.

Far away to the right the great projecting socket of the crater flickered
intermittently with a nerve of fire. It was like the glinting of the
watchful eye of some vast Crustacean, and in that harsh and stupendous
desolation seemed the final crown and expression of utter inhumanity.

I started upon hearing the low whisper of my companion at my ear.

"In the bay yesterday the Signor saved my life. I give the Signor, in
return, my life's secret."

He seized my right hand in his left with a sinewy clutch, and pointed a
stiff finger at the luminous blots.

"See there, and there, and there," he shrilled. "One floats and wavers
like a spineless ribbon of seaweed in the water; another burns with a
steady radiance; a third blares from its fissure like a flame driven by
the blowpipe. It is all a question of the under-draught, and some may
feel it a little, and some a little more or a little less. Ah! but I will
show you one that feels it not at all--a hole, a narrow shaft that goes
straight down into the pit of the great hell, and is cold as the mouth of
a barbel."

The bones of his face stood out like rocks against sand, and the pupils
of his maniac eyes were glazed or fell into shadow as the volcano
lightnings fluttered.

Suddenly he drew me to a broken pile of sulphur rock lying tumbled
against a ridge of the mountain that ran towards the crater. It lay
heaped, a fused and fantastic ruin; and in a moment the old man leapt
from me, and was tugging by main strength a vast fragment from its place.

I leaned over his shoulder, and looked down upon the hollow revealed by
the displaced boulder. It was like the bell of a mighty trumpet, and in
the middle a puckered opening seemed to suck inwards, as it we