We were now about a third of the way up, and we had only taken about half an hour to ascend four hundred feet; the east brightened more and more; the fear of not arriving at the summit of the cone in time to see the sunrise lent us courage, and we started again with new enthusiasm, without pausing to look at the immense horizon which widened beneath our feet at each step; but the further we advanced, the more the difficulties increased; at each step the slope became more abrupt, the earth more friable, and the air rarer. Soon, on our right, we began to hear subterranean roarings that attracted our attention; our guide walked in front of us and led us to a fissure from which came a great noise and a thick sulphurous smoke blown out by an interior current of air. Approaching the edges of this cleft, we saw at an unfathomable depth a bottom of incandescent and red liquid; and when we stamped our feet, the ground resounded in the distance like a drum. Happily it was perfectly calm, for if the wind had blown this smoke over to our side, we should have been asphyxiated, for it is charged with a terrible fumes of sulphur.
We found ourselves opposite the crater,—an immense well, eight miles in circumference and 900 feet deep; the walls of this excavation were covered with scarified matter of sulphur and alum from top to bottom; in the bottom as far as we could see at the distance from where we stood, there was some matter in eruption, and from the abyss there ascended a tenuous and tortuous smoke, resembling a gigantic serpent standing on his tail. The edges of the crater were cut out irregularly at a greater or less height. We were at one of the highest points.
Our guide permitted us to look at this sight for a moment, holding us back, however, every now and then by our clothing when we approached too near the precipice, for the rock is so friable that it could easily give way beneath our feet, and we should repeat the joke of Empedocles; then he asked us to remove ourselves about twenty feet from the crater to avoid all accidents, and to look around us.
The east, whose opal tints we had noticed when leaving the Casa Inglese, had changed to tender rose, and was now inundated with the flames of the sun whose disc we began to perceive above the mountains of Calabria. Upon the sides of these mountains of a dark and uniform blue, the towns and villages stood out like little white points. The strait of Messina seemed a simple river, while to the right and left we saw the sea like an immense mirror. To the left, this mirror was spotted with several black dots: these black dots were the islands of the Lipariote archipelago. From time to time one of these islands glimmered like an intermittent light-house; this was Stromboli, throwing out flames. In the west, everything was in darkness. The shadow of Etna cast itself over all Sicily.
For three-quarters of an hour the spectacle did nothing but gain in magnificence. I have seen the sun rise on Rigi and the Faulhorn, those two Titans of Switzerland: nothing is comparable to the view on Etna’s summit; Calabria from Pizzo to Cape dell Armi, the pass from Scylla to Reggio, the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Ionian Sea and the Æolian Islands that seem within reach of your hand; to the right, Malta floating on the horizon like a light mist; around us the whole of Sicily, seen from a bird’s-eye view with its shores denticulated with capes, promontories, harbours, creeks and roads; its fifteen cities and three hundred villages; its mountains which seem like hills; its valleys which we know are furrowed with ploughs; its rivers which seem threads of silver, as in autumn they fall from the sky to the grasses of the meadows; and, finally, the immense roaring crater, full of flames and smoke, overhead Heaven and at its feet Hell: such a spectacle, made us forget fatigue, danger, and suffering. I admired it all without reservation, with my eyes and my soul. Never had God seemed so near and, consequently, so great.
We remained there an hour, dominating all the old world of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Theocritus, without the idea of touching a pencil occurring to Jadin or myself, until it seemed to us that this picture had entered deeply into our hearts and remained graven there without the aid of ink or sketch. Then we threw a last glance over this horizon of three hundred leagues, a sight seen once in a lifetime, and we began our descent.
Le Speronare: Impressions de Voyage (Paris, 1836.)
FOOTNOTE:
[10] The principal eruptions of Etna took place in the year 662, B. C., and in A. D. 225, 420, 812, 1169, 1285, 1329, 1333, 1408, 1444, 1446, 1447, 1536, 1603, 1607, 1610, 1614, 1619, 1634, 1669, 1682, 1688, 1689, 1702, 1766, and 1781.