I rambled one evening over a wide tract of lava which the prince of Biscari has endeavoured to reclaim. There are a few fig-trees in the hollows, and some caper plants scattered about the rocks. The Indian fig seems to do as well, or perhaps better than anything else, but all these are occupants merely of a few crevices, into which perhaps, the rain may have washed a little soil, or in some instances they may open a communication with the old surface below. The rock itself supports nothing but crustaceous lichens, and that very partially; yet the lava is, I believe, one hundred and twenty years old.
From Catania I determined to visit the summit of Ætna, and therefore took a horse to Nicolosi, about twelve miles distant. The road is very rough, among rocks of lava, but the country in general is extremely fertile: we have nothing here but the opposite extremes, either exuberant fertility, or utter barrenness. From this place I ascended on foot, in the hope of finding a great variety of natural productions, and examining them and the scenery at leisure; the first four miles from Nicolosi are on a bed of cinders, but mixed in the latter part of the way with small rocks of lava; then we pass about four miles of the woody region, and near the extremity of this division of the ascent is the Spelonca del Capriole, where we stopt to eat and to rest. Though we arrived there about one o’clock, my guide was very desirous of staying till midnight, and ascending the remaining part of the mountain in the dark, I preferred walking while I could see the objects about me, but found much less to interest me than I had expected. Ætna boasts that it stands single and alone, but this very circumstance robs it of great part of its beauty. Already, at Nicolosi, we were too much above other objects to enjoy much pleasure from them, and higher up we are continually sensible of this defect. The little conical hills scattered abundantly over the lower slopes, afford indeed some relief to the eye, but they are too small and too similar to satisfy it, or to excite the imagination. Each of these is generally divided into two summits by a hollow or groove passing through them from the west of north to the east of south. The woody region is on this route less extensive than I had anticipated; and though the trees are of a good size, there is nothing remarkable about them. They are mostly a variety of Quercus Robur, with a downy leaf, but beech and ilex are intermixed. No fern, except Pteris aquilina, and no rare mosses. Here are no bold crags, no wild and deep ravines, no foaming torrents, not even a moist rock, or a wet piece of ground, or a little spring or rill, except just below the patches of snow; and these, after a course of a few yards, unaccompanied by any trace of vegetation, disappear. The moisture of the atmosphere supports a few scattered plants in the loose soil. Everywhere cinders, and nothing but cinders. Ætna is a mountain of dust and ashes. The beds of lava are equally cinders in appearance. If we consider one of these as a fluid, moving mass, half a mile wide, and 20 or 30 feet thick, it is a sublime and terrible object, but the rough, naked plain which remains, is merely ugly; and the bare, rocky bank, not presenting any unbroken mass even in proportion to its trifling elevation, is hardly of sufficient consequence to form a feature in the landscape. Ætna is a volcano, and it has no interest but what it derives from this character. We continued traversing its heavy heaps of dark sand till a little before sunset, when we arrived at the Casa Inglese. During the night lightning was frequent, but the mountain made no noise and exhibited no light. I could hardly fancy myself so close to the most celebrated burning mountain in Europe.
About half an hour before sunrise my guide called me up and we began to ascend the cone. We first passed over a rough bed of lava, afterwards we mounted a slope of snow, which crackled under the feet as if fresh frozen. The snow, however, by no means forms a continued cap to the mountain, but is found merely in patches and hollows, and it can hardly be said that the mountain enters the snow-line, unless we suppose a considerable space at the summit to be warmed by the transmission of heated vapour. At the same time it is difficult to say exactly what the snow-line is. We might probably fix it where the mean temperature of summer, i. e. of the two hottest months of the year, does not exceed 32°, but this is in some degree both vague and arbitrary, and not easily determined. The ascent of the cone of loose cinders is very fatiguing, as they slide back at almost every step. In many places there are little spiracles of what I supposed at first to be smoke, but they proved to be steam, with but a slightly sulphureous smell. I was delighted when, by my guide’s motions, I perceived that he had arrived at the edge of the crater, but the pleasure was soon changed into disappointment. The sun was rising amongst clouds. A dense, white vapour, greatly below me, covered almost all Sicily, and the crater itself was so full of steam that I could see nothing. This steam however, partially cleared away at intervals, and by watching my opportunity, I was able to form a pretty distinct idea of the great crater. The edges are steep and rugged, and smoke, or rather steam, was rising almost everywhere; within, there were three little volcanoes, i. e. small, conical hills, each with its crater. The largest of these was quiet; the other two sent out smoke or steam; but no flames, or ignited matter, have been seen here for six years.
In descending, we passed by the Philosopher’s tower, reduced to a small fragment of rubble-work, and curious only from its situation. At a little distance from this we reached the edge of a wide valley, or hollow, which I think interested me more than anything else. It appears at some time to have been the ancient crater, before the present upper cone was raised, and a tremendous one it must have been. It is now a vast basin of I suppose full two miles in diameter, surrounded by broken, craggy precipices. On the slopes there is here and there some appearance of vegetation, but it is exceedingly trifling, and the bottom is all black and bare. About eight years ago a crater was formed within the basin, and a stream of lava issued from it a quarter of a mile in length, but not passing the bounds of this valley of desolation. Smoke was still issuing from its summit. I regretted much that I had not followed a plan I once conceived of descending to Taormina, which would have carried me through much more interesting scenes than the ascent from Catania, and I should have seen the famous chesnut-tree; but it was too late, for we had no provisions, and none were to be had in that direction. I therefore returned to Nicolosi, which we reached a little after noon, and there hired a mule to convey me back to Catania.
LETTER LIV.
TAORMINA—MESSINA—PALERMO.
Palermo, 15th August, 1818.
I left Catania on the first of August. The views of Ætna suffer as much as the views from it, by its perfect unity. In ascending other mountains we maintain a sort of contest with the inferior hills, and are pleased to see them, one after the other, confess our superiority and lose their consequence. The same hills in looking at a mountain, form a sort of scale, which assists in our estimate of its magnitude. Some huge mass perhaps, at no great distance, impresses us with its magnitude, while yet the trees and buildings upon it enable us to measure its size. As we recede, other eminences bright with the hues of heaven, rise in rich succession, behind that which at first we had thought so immense; and beyond the rest the lofty summit, whose colour almost mixes with the sky, rises in supreme majesty. The mind measures the more distant by the nearer object, and the powers of the imagination are excited to the utmost. From the want of all these accessories, Ætna does not look so high as Parnassus, which yet I apprehend it considerably exceeds. The snow had diminished greatly since I first saw it on my way to Malta, yet the patches were considerable, even on its southern face, a circumstance the more remarkable in a mountain where there are few considerable hollows. Perhaps however, the cinders, in spite of their black colour, are very bad conductors of heat, for dry as was the absolute surface on Ætna, the mule in most parts, exposed a degree of moisture at every footstep; and this surprised me very much, when connected with the general nakedness and barrenness of the mountain.
Though the clouds hung low, and I was rather out of humour from being cheated at Catania, and from finding myself mounted on a bad horse, yet I found the scenery along the base of Ætna very delightful. The country is inhabited and cultivated, with abundance of olives and other trees, and beautiful little eminences rise gently between the road and the shore; and though this richness and fertility is occasionally interrupted by beds of lava, yet these are but slight blemishes, and perhaps contributed by contrast to enhance the pleasure. On approaching Taormina it became still finer. Some bold, advancing summits appeared dimly through the clouds, with deep, woody valleys between them, and farther off the rugged mountains of Taormina, ridgy and interrupted, and contrasting strongly in their broken, irregular forms, with Ætna and its dependent cones. The road is execrable. The waiter at Catania assured me that an excellent road had been made by the English all the way to Messina, but this was a lie invented to put me in a good humour, that I might bleed more freely. A tax indeed was laid on for the purpose of forming such a work, but the money has never reached its object. I procured some macaroni and love apples at a village called Le Giarre, and about an hour before sunset climbed the steep hill of Taormina, in company with the innkeeper, whom we found on the shore, and who conducted me to his house. I hastily walked to some of the principal objects. The town occupies a lofty situation, but on one side are two rocks, rising considerably higher; and the ancient theatre occupies the hollow between them. On the other side of the town there is a still loftier eminence, crowned with a castle; a second fortress, called Mola, is some hundred feet higher than the first, and beyond this the ground rises interruptedly to Monte Venere, which, if my landlord may be trusted, is nearly equal to Ætna, but whose elevation I should not estimate at much more than 3,000 feet; perhaps however, I did not see the loftiest summit. I returned to the theatre on the following morning. It is a fine, and very interesting relick, but my eye was diverted from nearer objects by the magnificent view spreading full in front of the koilon. It is here that Ætna appears in all his majesty. The long, descending line seems almost interminable, and hence too we distinguish the vast hollow which I had looked into from the summit, and which forms a grand feature in the scene; though I suspect that my knowledge of what they indicated, rendered its outlines much more impressive to me, than they would have been to a stranger.
The ruins of the Theatre are very considerable, and highly interesting from the preservation of the proscenium. It is of brick, but appears to have been adorned with marble columns and entablatures, and was perhaps cased with marble; circumstances which rather indicate a Roman than a Greek construction. A range of arches crowns the slope of the Sedili, running in part, along the very ridge of the hill.
On returning to dinner from the theatre, a guide came to offer me his services to point out the antiquities of the place. Two had applied the evening before. The first had attended kings and princes, and written sonnets in their praise, which he did me the honour to repeat to me. The other was a painter, an architect, and a poet, and had a son who was quite a prodigy; he also favoured me with some of his verses, but as I was neither king, prince, nor even a nobleman, I did not accept the services of either. These antiquities, besides the theatre, consist of part of the city walls, aqueducts, reservoirs, and tombs, and what is called a naumachia, which is a large, oblong court, sunk in the earth, and surrounded with niches. The wall, and these niches are built of brick, and there is a vault behind one part of them; but for the most part they seem to be against the earth.