“But who keeps up the fires?”
“The devil, Madame, without question. That is his home.”
We listened. The sound, when we were somewhat used to it, had a diabolical rhythm, as of the rise and fall of a thousand pistons, propelled by a head of steam that, without this safety-valve, would rend the solid globe asunder. It was angry, threatening, fiendish. The deep crevice was faced with bright crystals of sulphur that glowed like gems between the bursts of smoke. A man broke off some with a long pole, and dragged them out to cool until we could handle them. The ground is saturated with sulphurous gases, and the lips of the numerous fissures encrusted with sulphites and alum. The idea of the conscious malignity of the volcano was sustained by the warning of two of the men standing near to a gentleman who had lighted a cigar.
“No! no! the signore must not bring that here. She will not allow it. Ecco!” as a volume of stifling vapor gushed out in our direction. “It comes to you, you see!”
“Government monopoly! No interference tolerated,” said Caput, as the offender retreated.
“It is always so! She does not like cigars, nor so much as a match,” was all the solution we could get from the men of the phenomenon. “She will smoke. Nobody else must.”
Fifty yards to the right of the nearly extinct crater is a fountain of hot mud in a little hollow. An ugly, restless thing, that shivers and heaves continually, and, every few moments, spouts like a whale, or an uneasy villain whose conscience periodically betrays him into a visible casting up of mire and dirt. The mud is a greasy black compound of unpleasant ingredients, beginning with brimstone, and, to test the heat, our civil man offered to boil eggs in it.
“Suppose one were to fall in?” queried I, eying the chaldron in expectation of the next upward rush.
“Ah, Madame! he would be boiled also. Unless he should go too soon, all the way down,” pointing ominously.
The horrible stuff trembled, surged in the middle as if a goblin-head were rising—bubbled, and sank with a groan. The imp would try it again presently, perhaps emerge to sight. I continued to gaze.