ear
and a half after the earthquake and saw the funeral of one whose body had
recently been found; it was not the last.

THE SLOPES OF ETNA

CHAPTER XVIII
LAVA

We started from Catania at three o'clock on a dull afternoon at the end
of March to see one of the streams of lava that Etna was sending out
during the eruption of 1910. Peppino Di Gregorio had arranged everything
and provided four of his friends to make company for us and to act as
guides, some of them having been before. He and I went in a one-horse
carriage with two of the friends and the other two came on their
bicycles. There was, first, another Peppino who had been in America,
where he earned his living by making cigars. He had forgotten how it was
done and, besides, it required special tools, so he could not have shown
me even if he had remembered. Since his return home to Catania he has
been employed by the municipio. He begged me to call him not Peppino but
Joe, because he would be so English. Then there was Ninu, also employed
by the municipio, a great bullock of a fellow bursting with health, whose
legs were too short for him and his smile a dream of romance. The other
two were Alessandro, about whom I got no information, and a grave
brigadier of the Guardia Municipale.

The road took us up-hill among villas and between walls enclosing fields
of volcanic soil, very fertile, and occasionally a recent eruption had
buried the fertility under fresh lava, hard and black, on which nothing
will grow for years.

Patrick Brydone went to Sicily in 1770, and wrote an account of his
journey: _A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Letters to
William Beckford_, _Esquire_, _of Somerly_, _in Suffolk_, _from Patrick
Brydone_, _F.R.S._ Near Catania he saw some lava covered with a scanty
soil, incapable of producing either corn or vines; he imagined from its
barrenness that

it had run from the mountain only a few ages ago; but was surprised
to be informed by Signor Recupero, the historiographer of Etna, that
this very lava is mentioned by Diodorus Siculus to have burst from
Etna in the time of the second Punic war, when Syracuse was besieged
by the Romans.

It seems that the stream ran from Etna to the sea, and cut off the
passage of a detachment of soldiers who were on their way from Taormina
to the relief of the besieged, and Diodorus took his authority from
inscriptions on Roman monuments found on the lava it