harrowing them to harden into black and
brown stone. We could see again how the broad stream, flowing down,
squeezed and squashed like mud, had taken all fantastic shapes,--now
like gnarled tree roots; now like serpents in a coil; here the human
form, or a part of it,--a torso or a limb,--in agony; now in other
nameless convolutions and contortions, as if heaved up and twisted in
fiery pain and suffering,--for there was almost a human feeling in it;
and again not unlike stone billows. We could see how the cooling crust
had been lifted and split and turned over by the hot stream underneath,
which, continually oozing from the rent of the eruption, bore it down
and pressed it upward. Even so low as the point where we crossed the
lava of 1858 were fissures whence came hot air.

An hour brought us to the resting-place called the Hermitage, an osteria
and observatory established by the government. Standing upon the end of
a spur, it seems to be safe from the lava, whose course has always been
on either side; but it must be an uncomfortable place in a shower of
stones and ashes. We rode half an hour longer on horseback, on a nearly
level path, to the foot of the steep ascent, the base of the great
crater. This ride gave us completely the wide and ghastly desolation of
the mountain, the ruin that the lava has wrought upon slopes that were
once green with vine and olive, and busy with the hum of life. This
black, contorted desert waste is more sterile and hopeless than any
mountain of stone, because the idea of relentless destruction is
involved here. This great hummocked, sloping plain, ridged and seamed,
was all about us, without cheer or relaxation of grim solitude. Before
us rose, as black and bare, what the guides call the mountain, and which
used to be the crater. Up one side is worked in the lava a zigzag path,
steep, but not very fatiguing, if you take it slowly. Two thirds of
the way up, I saw specks of people climbing. Beyond it rose the cone of
ashes, out of which the great cloud of sulphurous smoke rises and rolls
night and day now. On the very edge of that, on the lip of it, where the
smoke rose, I also saw human shapes; and it seemed as if they stood on
the brink of Tartarus and in momently imminent peril.

We left our horses in a wild spot, where scorched boulders had
fallen upon the lava bed; and guides and boys gathered about us like
cormorants: but, declining their offers to pull us up, we began the
ascent, wh