It follows that volcanoes are peaks of an unstable character. They are upstarts by nature, and they are easily pulled down. Among mountains they are the most short-lived. In their decay they lack the dignity of a peak of crystalline rock, that fights against disintegration and resists to the last, holding forth to the sky its splintered crags like passionately protesting hands. There is no protest in a volcano. It yields willingly to decay. The debris of its upper rocks flow down its face almost like water. They grind together into dust and are blown away by the winds. The old moraines of Aconcagua ultimately turn into sand dunes.
Yet these mushroom monsters are not without their compensations. When active they enjoy a magnificence of public advertisement that no other kind of peak, even when it is the scene of a particularly ghastly accident, can ever hope to rival. They grow in height, or are blown to perdition, amidst earthquakes and terrific thunders. Lightnings flicker about them like the dartings of a serpent's tongue. The storm-clouds that envelop snowy peaks are nothing to the monstrous piles of smoke and darkness that wreathe the brows of an erupting volcano. Blasts of fire shoot from them, and for glaciers, their sides are flooded with molten lava. Few of us can hope to see such sights in the fulness of their glory.
When the mountain is full-grown, and its days of activity are done, for a while it reigns, a figure of perfect grace, a very queen for elegance and beauty of form. Who that has ever seen Vesuvius can deny this fact. Probably no snowy peaks in the world are more absolutely perfect in form than the white-clad giant volcanoes of Kamchatka, or, on a smaller scale, the peerless Fuji of Japan. The outline of the cone, gently rising from the foot, and then steepening in its incomparable logarithmic curve, is the gracefullest that nature produces on a large scale. Even the effulgent domes of the greatest cumulous clouds that, on a faultless summer afternoon, soar into the clearest blue sky, are not to be compared with volcanoes at their best. These have the aspect of works of art, made, as it were, expressly to incorporate an idea of beauty. They possess the symmetry of a fine crystal, but at the same time, a grace far beyond what is possible to any crystalline form. And then, how they soar! How their beautiful heads seem almost to float in the blue! How symmetrically the mists gather about their summits! At one time the base will vanish in the bright opacity of the lower air, and the top will be seen in sharp distinctness, like a floating island in the sky. At another, the summit will fade away, and the shadowed base will fill the vision with its purple solidity. And always there hangs about a volcano the memory of its fire-begetting, and the suspicion that all may not yet be over. It is, as it were, an inscribed finger-post, warning us of the molten core within. It is at once a memorial and a monition to those that dwell beneath it. It is the witness of past and the herald of future convulsions; yet, being such, it is itself in form the peacefullest and tenderest in nature. No woman's robe droops more delicately over her bosom than droops the once molten drapery of a volcano. Its aspect bears a double and opposed suggestiveness. Such are volcanoes in the day of their perfection, before the denuding forces have made inroads on the symmetry of their form.
Yet even then it is not well to approach them too closely, unless you would have the sense of their beauty supplanted by a different kind of emotion. The nearer you approach a snow-mountain, such as Mont Blanc, and the more intimately you penetrate its white recesses, and acquaint yourself with its details of crevasse and sérac, the more conscious are you of the perfection of its finish and the loveliness of its details. It is not so with a volcano at any time of its career. When it is newly fashioned and the lava streams are still in movement and smoking upon its sides, and the cinders and ashes of its recent ejection are piled upon it, to approach them is to behold sights more provocative of horror than of admiration. They appal, they create astonishment, but they do not attract. Cast your eye over the remarkable series of photographs by Dr. Tempest Anderson, published under the title "Volcanic Studies," and you will have ample proof of this. Consider the Icelandic gorges, the outer crater of Teneriffe, or the views of recent volcanic energies displayed in St. Vincent—the mud-rivers, the sand-strewn valleys; here is enough to interest and more than enough to appal, but the kind of beauty associated with a distant view of a volcano is absent. There is no grace, no charm, none of the sweet feminine outline which makes volcanoes the queens and fair ladies among hills.
MONTREUX, LAKE OF GENEVA
But when all the dramatic stage of their existence is over, and the fires are out and the earth around has ceased from quaking; when trees have gathered over the lava torrents and rich vegetation has covered up cinders and ash; when the sulphurous vents are become sapphire pools of clear water overshadowed by foliage, and all the ghastly details of tragedy are covered up by the splendid garments of tropical vegetation; then you may approach and ascend if you please, but it will not be as a climber, for the climber is one who seeks the naked places of the earth, and does not wander for choice in grassy dells and tree-embosomed shades.
He, however, who should converse about volcanoes and say no more than this, would leave a most false impression upon his hearers, for Nature always provides compensations for her sincere and humble lovers, and even in the barest volcano she has not failed. The very rapidity with which they yield to destructive forces leads to results not discoverable in stronger and more resolute peaks. Frost, winter, and snow breach their sides with exceeding facility. Torrents dig gullies into them. The very winds blow their substance away. Hence it comes that a volcano in active process of destruction often provides detailed scenery of astonishing grandeur and boldness. Its vertical-walled gullies, its cliffs, its castellated ridges are like none other. There is no aspect of durability about them, no signs of hoary antiquity, none of the dignity that belongs to archæan rocks. They are visibly in rapid decay, yet, for all that and even because of it, they are strangely imposing with a sort of rococo grandeur. If the Meije and Ushba are Romanesque, if the Matterhorn, Masherbrum, and Siniolkum are Gothic, we may describe the world's shattered volcanoes as Flamboyant. They boast a greater and more unusual variety of forms, a multiplicity of details that bewilders. The spiry exuberance of Milan Cathedral can be paralleled in the neighbourhood of Aconcagua. Nowhere are buttresses more emphatic, points of rock in perilous precipitance of decay more plentiful, cliffs more abrupt, the skeleton of the mountains more nakedly displayed.
Yet better deserving of note is the brilliancy and variety of the colouring by which volcanic rocks are often characterised. The local colouring of Alpine rocks is seldom rich. The Dolomites indeed have a reputation for the richness of their tints, but it is mainly derived from the sunrise and sunset colouring which they reflect so brilliantly that it almost seems to proceed from them. The general effect of Alpine rocks is some variety of grey or brown, the tone of which is deepened by contrast with the snows. Except in volcanic districts, it is only in Spitsbergen, and at one or two spots in the Himalayas, that I have observed the local colouring of the rocks to form a prominent factor in the beauty of a mountain view. There indeed the red and yellow sandstones display their rich tints with great effect, so that the colour, shining over the wide expanses of Arctic glacier and snow-field, becomes a main element, and reduces the forms of the peaks to a secondary consideration. Yet in Spitsbergen this only happens in a relatively small area, within Kings Bay.
In volcanic districts, however, the colouring of the rocks is almost always remarkable. It seems as though Nature had emptied her whole palette upon them. Hardly any tint, from white to black, is missing. Other mountains depend for their colour upon the atmosphere. These are independent of that source. Their own colour is predominant. All they ask for is transparent air and bright sunshine to display them. Their combination is so unusual, their chord so unlike any to which we are accustomed in ordinary natural surroundings, that they cannot fail to be the chief element in the view. That is why photographs of volcanic scenery convey an impression so different from actual sight. The normal blues, greens, and browns of the temperate habitable regions; the black, greys, and whites of the snowy world; the blue sea, white sand, and red cliffs of a Devonian coast: such chords of colour are usual; the eye expects them. Even a tropical landscape, except for its occasional blazes of blossom, belongs to the same category. Autumnal glories, first of golden harvest, later of iridescent foliage, are an accustomed sight. But all these schemes of colour belong to a wholly different category from that which volcanic rock-masses display. They bring together, combine, and contrast a whole series of unusual tints. Their purples are not the purples which we elsewhere know. Their greens are not the greens of vegetation. Their yellows are not the yellows of a blossoming field or a fading forest.