The Dodge Club; Or, Italy in MDCCCLIX

by James De Mille

As the Senator descended the smoke entered his eyes, month, and nostrils, making him cough and sneeze fearfully. The sand slid; the heat under the surface pained his feet; every step made it worse. However, he kept on bravely. At length he reached the spot where the others were standing.

[Illustration: The Descent Of Vesuvius.]

At the foot of the declivity was an angular rock which jutted out for about twelve feet. It was about six feet wide. Its sides went down precipitously. The Senator walked painfully to where they were standing. It was a fearful scene. All around arose the sides of the crater, black and rocky, perpendicular on all sides, except the small slope down which they had just descended--a vast and gloomy circumference. But the most terrific sight lay beneath.

The sides of the crater went sheer down to a great depth enclosing a black abyss which in the first excitement of the scene the startled fancy might well imagine extending to the bowels of the earth from which there came rolling up vast clouds dense black sulphurous which at times completely encircled them shutting out every thing from view filling eyes nose mouth with fumes of brimstone forcing them to hold the tails of their coats or the skirts it's all the same over their faces so as not to be altogether suffocated while again after a while a fierce blast of wind driving downward would hurl the smoke away and dashing it against the other side of the crater gather it up in dense volumes of blackest smoke in thick clouds which rolled up the flinty cliffs and reaching the summit bounded fiercely out into the sky to pass on and be seen from afar as that dread pennant of Vesuvius which is the sign and symbol of its mastery over the earth around it and the inhabitants thereof ever changing and in all its changes watched with awe by fearful men who read in those changes their own fate now taking heart as they see it more tenuous in its consistency anon shuddering as they see it gathering in denser folds and finally awe-stricken and all overcome as they see the thick black cloud rise proudly up to heaven in a long straight column at whose upper termination the colossal pillar spreads itself out and shows to the startled gaze the dread symbol of the cypress tree the herald of earthquakes eruptions and--

--There--I flatter myself that in the way of description it would not be easy to beat the above. I just throw it off as my friend Tit-marsh, poor fellow, once said, to show what I could do if I tried. I have decided not to put punctuation marks there, but rather to let each reader supply them for himself. They are often in the way, particularly to the writer, when he has to stop in the full flow of a description and insert them--

But--

We left our friends down in the crater of Vesuvius. Of course they hurried out as soon as they could, and mounting the treacherous steep they soon regained the summit, where the guides had stood bawling piteously all the time.

Then came the descent. It was not over the lava blocks, but in another place, which was covered with loose sliding sand. Away they started.

Buttons ahead, went with immense strides down the slope. At every step the sliding sand carried him about ten feet further, so that each step was equal to about twenty feet. It was like flying. But it was attended by so many falls that the descent of Buttons and Dick was accomplished as much by sliding and rolling as by walking.