Dagonet Abroad

by George R. Sims

I don’t know how long I should have remained gazing down into the jaws of the volcano, terrified, yet too fascinated to move, had I not felt symptoms of dizziness coming over me.

Not wishing to share the fate of the gentleman named Empedocles, who in the year 400 B.C. toppled over into the crater of Mount Etna, I made a violent effort and stepped slowly backward from the mouth of the crater, and gradually staggered over the rough rocks and piles of lava until, steaming and caked with sulphur, I returned to the little restaurant which has been obligingly built by the authorities at the foot of the cone.

Here I sat down to rest my weary limbs and recover my dazed senses. We had a bottle of Vesuvio—a wine made from the grapes which grow on the southern slopes of the mountain—and then we made our way to the world-famous observatory on the side of the mountain, over which Professor Palmieri presides, and which contains a marvellous instrument called a seismograph.

Professor Palmieri has made Vesuvius the study of his life. By the aid of his instrument he is able now to know twenty-four hours in advance whether the intentions of the mountain are honourable or not.

By the kindness of the aged professor I was enabled to examine the seismograph at my leisure, and I will briefly explain what it is.

It is a marvellous piece of mechanism, so arranged that certain wires are agitated every time Vesuvius breathes. It is a long way from the crater—in fact, it is actually on a neighbouring spur, but so perfectly is it arranged that every movement of the volcano is recorded. While I watched it the wires trembled—Vesuvius had thrown up a few stones. So delicate is the mechanism that if you put your wrist within the glass case which contains it your pulsation causes the wires to be agitated.

In the night, when the ‘observers’ sleep, the seismograph still records the force of every breath the volcano draws. Attached to spiral wires are a red pencil and a blue pencil, and underneath the points of these a piece of tape—such as is used in telegraphing—winds itself round a reel. Any force or agitation in the centre of the crater brings the pencils down upon the tape, and causes them to mark it. A spasm of one kind causes the red pencil to mark the tape, a spasm of another kind sets the blue pencil off. In the morning the member of the staff on duty simply looks at the tape, and he can tell exactly what ‘Old ‘Suvy’ has been up to in the night. This is only a rough outline of what this wonderful instrument of Professor Palmieri’s can accomplish. To understand it thoroughly you must see it yourself.

After we had spent a pleasant hour in the observatory, chatting with one of the attendants, who, by-the-bye, was formerly in the chorus of the Royal Italian Opera in London, we went down the mountain to the inn at which our horses had been stabled, and as soon as our coachman was ready we drove back again to Naples.

I was tired out and fell asleep, only waking up once, just in time to listen to a pious pifferari, who was making music at midnight before the shrine of the Madonna.

I had a day’s rest after doing Vesuvius, and then I set out for Pompeii. You can go by rail, so I didn’t this time have to rise at an abnormally early hour. The train that left Naples for Pompeii might have been a special from the Tower of Babel. Certainly every European language was represented in it. When I arrived at Pompeii I was hungry, and I adjourned at once to a restaurant, where a table d’hôte breakfast was being served in every language under the European sun. At the little table at which I managed to find a seat we were English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Roumanian, Russian, Pole, and Swede, and the other Continents were represented by a couple of Australians and three Americans. But it is an extraordinary thing that, when we conversed together in scraps of our various languages, we found we were all making the same joke about the food. The omelette was made with eggs discovered in Pompeii, which had been laid eighteen hundred years ago. The beef was from a cow which had been dug up petrified during the latest excavation; the apples had been found in the house of Diomed, where Diomed had left them when he fled from the rain of hot ashes that fell upon his doomed villa on November 24, 79. We all laughed at the joke, and the waiter—a polyglot personage, who talked fourteen languages all mixed up together at the same time—laughed too, and told us that it was on record that ever since there had been a restaurant in Pompeii every traveller who refreshed at it had perpetrated that very identical joke. And then he looked very hard at me, and said: ‘But, pardon, sir; do I know you? Is it not that you are Mr. ——?’ ‘You have guessed it the first time,’ I replied, putting the idiom into German as well as I could on the spur of the moment; ‘but where have you known me?’ ‘Ah, you no remember John! I am John, as was your waiter in sitting-room at the London North-Western Hotel at Liverpool.’ Oh, these jack-in-the-box sons of the Fatherland! They pursue me everywhere. Fancy meeting your Liverpool German waiter at Pompeii!