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 itself. So that after about 2000 years this lava had scarcely begun to be fertile. Afterwards Recupero, who was a canonico, “an ingenious ecclesiastic of this place,” told Brydone of a pit sunk near Jaci, where they had pierced through seven parallel surfaces of lava, most of them covered with a thick bed of rich earth.
Now, says he [Recupero], the eruption which formed the lowest of these lavas, if we may be allowed to reason from analogy, must have flowed from the mountain at least 14,000 years ago. Recupero tells me, he is exceedingly embarrassed by these discoveries in writing the history of the mountain.—That Moses hangs like a dead weight on him, and blunts all his zeal for enquiry; for that really he has not the conscience to make his mountain so young as that prophet makes the world.—What do you think of these sentiments from a Roman Catholic divine?—The bishop, who is strenuously orthodox—for it is an excellent see—has already warned him to be upon his guard, and not to pretend to be a better natural historian than Moses; nor to presume to urge anything that may in the smallest degree be deemed contradictory to his sacred authority. . . .
The lava, being a very porous substance, easily catches the dust that is carried about by the wind; which, at first I observe, only yields a kind of moss; this rotting, and by degrees increasing the soil, some small meagre vegetables are next produced; which rotting in their turn, are likewise converted into soil. But this process, I suppose, is often greatly accelerated by showers of ashes from the mountain, as I have observed in some places the richest soil, to the depth of five or six feet and upwards; and still below that, nothing but rocks of lava. It is in these spots that the trees arrive at such an immense size. Their roots shoot into the crevices of the lava, and lay such hold of it, that there is no instance of the winds tearing them up; though there are many of its breaking off their longest branches.
We passed several villages, and on one of the churches there was a group of three saints—S. Alfio, the padrone of the district, and his two brothers. I had never heard of S. Alfio, who they told me was a physician and lived in the third century; one of his brothers, S. Filiberto (whom the people call S. Liberto), was a surgeon, and his other brother, S. Cirino, was a chemist. They performed miracles, endured persecution, and were finally martyred for the faith in this way: First they had their three tongues cut out, then they were put into a saucepan such as the maccaroni is boiled in, only larger—large enough to hold three saints—and full of boiling oil: the saucepan was placed on a fire and they were cooked in it. Their bodies were afterwards burnt on a gridiron. This took place out of doors opposite a tavern, and three men, who had come to the tavern to drink, saw it all done. Having seen it, they went to sleep for three hundred years; then they woke up and wanted to pay for their drinks with the money they had in their pockets, which was money made of leather.
“What is this?” asked the landlord.
“It is money,” they replied.
“It is no use,” said the landlord. While they had been asleep that kind of money had gone out of circulation.
“It is good money,” they insisted.
“It is not money at all, it is only a piece of leather.”
“It was money yesterday evening,” said the spokesman, “when I saw Alfio, Cirino, and Liberto being martyred.” This is how the martyrdom of the three saints is