I had joked on the road about an eruption and what a fine thing it would be to write about; but standing within measurable distance of the seat of danger I am not only willing but decidedly anxious to postpone the experiment.
Our guide conducts us cautiously over the yellow masses of sulphurous rock and the yawning, steaming fissures, and the huge masses of coiled lava that look like twisted rope. Our feet are parboiled with the steam that rises from beneath them. The perspiration begins to burst from every pore. We are in a perfect Turkish bath, or, rather, imperfect one, in which the noxious fumes and vapours are allowed to escape and choke the patient.
We cough and sneeze, and I gasp out a prophecy that I shall be choked. My eyes smart as they have never smarted in the foulest London fog.
‘Close your mouths!’ yells our guide. We close our mouths and make frantic efforts not to inhale the awful fumes of Vesuvius through our nostrils, and still we stagger on with trembling limbs and anxious faces, and at last we stand on the edge of the crater and peer down into the abyss below.
The sight is terrible, and yet sublime in its grandeur.
Even as we look, blinded and choked, there is a loud report, and hundreds of large stones are hurled high in the air.
The ground rocks beneath us. There is another report, and another, and this time huge masses of rock are flung aloft from the infernal depths of the crater.
I am fascinated by the scene, though I am in a state of mortal terror. My companion urges me to come away. He has had enough of it, and is thinking of the day when he had to fly for his life. No one who has ever seen the burning lava pour down the sides of Vesuvius, and has been in its path, ever wants to behold the sight again.
I, too, am thinking, but my thoughts have flown farther back than my friend’s. I am thinking of all the scenes of horror and death and desolation of which this stupendous volcano has been the cause. I think of the buried cities that lie around me, hidden for ever beneath the deadly vomit of the mouth into whose insatiable jaws I stand and gaze.
Herculaneum and Pompeii are below me, and hundreds of villages have been swallowed up in the bygone centuries, and have left no record on the pages of history.