Buried Cities, Volume 1: Pompeii

by Jennie Hall

"We climbed a little higher above the arch. There was a kind of chimney in the rock. Smoke and stream were coming out of it. I went close. The fumes of sulphur choked me. I reached out and picked some lumps of pure sulphur from the edge of the rock. For one moment the smoke ceased. I held my breath and looked down the hole. I saw the glare of red-hot lava flowing beneath. The mountain was a pot, full of boiling rock."

Another man writes of a visit in 1868, a quieter year.

"At first we climbed gentle slopes through vineyards and fields and villages. Sometimes we came suddenly upon a black line in a green meadow. A few years before it had flowed down red-hot. Further up we reached large stretches of rock. Here wild vines and lupines were growing in patches where the lava had decayed into soil. Then came bare slopes with dark hollow and sharp ridges. We walked on old stiff lava-streams. Sometimes we had to plod through piles of coarse, porous cinders. Sometimes we climbed over tangled, lumpy beds of twisted, shiny rock. Sometimes we looked into dark arched tunnels. Red streams had once flowed out of them. A few times we passed near fresh cracks in the mountain. Here steam puffed out.

"At last we reached a broad, hot piece of ground. Here were smoking holes. The night before I had looked at them with a telescope from the foot of the mountain. I had seen red rivers flowing from them. Now they were empty. Last night's lava lay on the slope, cooled and black. I was standing on it. My feet grew hot. I had to keep moving. The air I breathed was warm and smelled like that of an iron foundry. I pushed my pole into a crack in the rock. The wood caught fire. I was standing on a thin crust. What was below? I broke out a piece of the hard lava. A red spot glared up at me. Under the crust red-hot lava was still flowing. I knew that it would be several years before it would be perfectly cool."

So for three centuries people have watched Vesuvius at work. But she is much older than that—thousands of years older—older than any city or country or people in the world. In all that time she has poured out millions of tons of matter—lava, huge glassy boulders, little pebbles of pumice stone, long shining hairs, fine dust or ashes. All these things are different forms of melted rock. Sometimes the steam blows the liquid into fine dust; sometimes it breaks it into little pieces and fills them with bubbles. At another time the steam is not so strong and only pushes the stuff out gently over the crater's edge. Many different minerals are found in these rocks—iron, copper, lead, mica, zinc, sulphur. Some pieces are beautiful in color—blue, green, red, yellow. Precious stones have sometimes been found—garnets, topaz, quartz, tourmaline, lapis lazuli. But most of the stone is dull black or brown or gray.

All this heavy matter drops close to the mountain. And on calm days the ashes, also, fall near at home. Indeed, the volcano has built up its own mountain. But a heavy wind often carries the fine dust for hundreds of miles. Once it was blown as far as Constantinople and it darkened the sun and frightened people there. Some of the ashes fall into the sea. For years the currents carry them about from shore to shore. At last they settle to the bottom and make clay or sand or mud. The material lies there for thousands of years and is hard packed into a soft fine grained rock, called tufa. The city of Naples to-day is built of such stone that once lay under the sea. An earthquake long ago lifted the ocean bottom and turned it into dry land. Now men live upon it and cut streets in it and grow crops on it.

So for many miles about, Vesuvius has been making earth. Her ashes lie hundreds of feet deep. Men dig wells and still find only material that has been thrown out of the volcano. When this matter grows old and lies under the sun and rain it turns to good soil. The acids of water and air and plants eat into it. Rain wears it away. Plant roots crack the rocks open. The top layer becomes powdered and rotted and mixed with vegetable loam and is fertile soil. So the country all around the volcano is a rich garden. Tomatoes, melons, grapes, olives, figs, cover the land.

But Vesuvius alone has not made all this ground. She is in a nest of volcanoes. They have all been at work like her, spouting ashes and pumice and rocks and lava. Ten miles away is a wide stretch of country where there are more than a dozen old craters. Twenty miles out in the blue bay a volcano stands up out of the water. A hundred miles south is a group of small volcanic islands. They have hot springs. One has a volcano that spouts every five or six minutes. At night it is like a lighthouse for sailors. One of these Islands is only two thousand years old. The men of Pompeii saw it pushed up out of the sea during an earthquake. A little farther south is Mt. Aetna in Sicily. It is a greater mountain than Vesuvius and has done more work than she has done. So all the southern part of Italy seems to be the home of volcanoes and earthquakes.

There are many other such places scattered over the world—Iceland, Mexico, South America, Japan, the Sandwich Islands. Here the same terrible play is going on—thunder, clouds, falling ashes, scalding rain, flowing lava. The earth is being turned inside out, and men are learning what she is made of.