When you visit Vesuvius, make an early start and give yourself plenty of time. It took our party four hours and a half, with a good team, to drive from Naples to the foot of the steep cone at the top. The journey takes you through some of the disagreeable parts of the city and gives you a new impression of its extent. When at last you do turn from the squalid streets and begin the ascent of the mountain, your enjoyment begins. The fresh breeze, laden with the fragrance of orange blossoms, tempers the heat, and at every turn of the winding, climbing road you have the most entrancing views of the city and the bay. The mountain itself is partly covered with the luxuriant greenery of orchards and villas, and partly by the gloomy beds of lava thrown out by successive eruptions--"a black ocean, which was tumbled into a thousand fantastic shapes--a wild chaos of ruin, desolation and barrenness--a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of miniature mountains rent asunder--of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and twisted masses of blackness that mimicked branching roots, great vines, trunks of trees all interlaced and mingled together; and all these weird shapes, all this turbulent panorama, all this stormy, far stretching waste of blackness, with its thrilling suggestiveness of life, of action, of boiling, surging, furious motion, was petrified!--all stricken dead and cold in the instant of its maddest rioting!--fettered, paralyzed and left to glower at heaven in impotent rage for evermore!"
[Illustration: A WINDY DAY ON MOUNT VESUVIUS.]
I had had the good fortune on a former visit to see the process of its formation. At that time the lava was actually flowing from a breach in the side of the mountain, a little below the cone which surrounds the great crater, and a party of us walked over a half mile or so among the wild rocks and congealed lava to get a sight of it. The rocks over which we walked were too hot to touch with the naked hand, and scorched the bottoms of our shoes. The fumes of sulphur escaping through the crevices made the air almost suffocating. These conditions became more aggravated the nearer we came to the object of our search, so that one or two of the party became quite unnerved, gave up the expedition, and returned. We felt like we were walking in a furnace. Then the guide made a turn round some great boulders, and there it was--a slowly moving stream of liquid fire, issuing from under a great rock, and flowing down the side of the mountain. Every one threw his hands before his face to protect it from the blistering heat. The guide, standing behind a big rock, reached over with a long pole into this fearful red river and lifted out a glob of the molten lava on the end of it, as you would dip up a bit of hot molasses candy on the end of a fork, then, withdrawing a little way, he disengaged the lava from the end of the pole with a smaller stick, and, asking me for a penny, he laid the coin on the lump of lava and pressed it well down into the mass which rose round the edges of the coin, holding it firmly in its place--and thus made for me a paper weight, which is my best souvenir of Vesuvius.