“Madame!” said a deprecating voice.
My friends had moved away. The guide, in the act of following, had glanced back, and, seeing me motionless beside the mammoth egg-boiler, recalling my question, descried suicidal intent in my eye and mien, and rushed back to avert a contretemps that might hurt his reputation as a safe conductor and civil man.
“The friends of Madame await her,” he said, insinuatingly. “Nor is it good for the lungs of Madame to inhale the gas from the pool,” affecting to cough. “The pool is not handsome. In effect, it is a devil of a place! Will not Madame have the goodness to walk on? There are other things to see, very interesting!”
I laughed, frightening him still more, I fear, for he kept near me all the time we were in the grounds, and whispered significantly to the gate-keeper as I passed out. Hawthorne doubts if his Zenobia would have drowned herself had she foreseen how disfigured a thing would be dragged up by the grappling-hook. Similar knowledge of feminine nature would have corrected our civil man’s suspicion of me. Felo de se in a boiling mud-hole would not tempt the maddest maniac who had, ever in her life, cared to look in her mirror.
Monte Nuovo is a really dead, if not gone, volcano, a mile and a half to the west of Pozzuoli. It came up in a night in 1538—a conical hill of considerable height—a conglomerate of lava, trachyte, pumice and ashes, now covered with shrubs and trees. The earthquake that created it, lowered the coast and cut off Lake Lacrinus from the sea. In mythological days, Hercules built a breakwater here that he might drive the bulls of Geryon from the neighboring marshes. This sank at the Monte Nuovo rising, but can be seen when the water is calm, together with ruined piers and masses of masonry. A road branches off here from the Baiæ thoroughfare to Lake Avernus.
Leaving the carriage on the shore of the latter, we went on foot to the Grotto of the Sibyl. It is a dark, damp opening in the hill on the south side of the lake. Rank vines festoon and evergreen thickets overshadow the mouth. Five or six fellows, with unshorn hair and beards, and in sheepskin coats and hats, clamored for permission to pilot us through the long passage—the fabled entrance of hell—into the central hall which lies midway between Lakes Avernus and Lacrinus.
“Should not be attempted by ladies!” cried Miss M—— from her open Baedeker.
One and all, we raised remonstrative voices against the resolution of our escort to penetrate the recess. Not see it when Homer had sung of it and Virgil depicted the descent of Æneas by this very route to the infernal regions! This was the protest as vehement as our entreaties. One might draw inferences the reverse of complimentary to himself from our alarm. Of what should he be afraid?
Had he heard how our friend, Mr. H——, after being carried in the guide’s arms through the shallow pool covering the grotto-floor, had been set down on the other side and forced to pay ten francs before the wretch would bring him back?
Yes! he had had the tale from the victim’s lips.