As sunset approached, and the shades of evening were beginning to add new touches of grandeur to the sublime spectacle, I took leave of it reluctantly, and, with Brobdingnagian strides down the volcanic ash-heap, descended in not more than seven minutes a space which it had once cost me a weary half-hour and the help of two guides to climb. Three hours later the red currents of lava could be seen from my window in Naples, glittering far away in the darkness, and streaking the black sides of the volcano like descending streams of molten gold.
[ MOUNT ETNA IN ERUPTION.]
BAYARD TAYLOR.
[It is not Etna in one of its gigantic throes of eruption that we propose to describe. The traveller whose story of the mountain we append was not fortunate enough to witness such a spectacle. But he saw it in a minor phase of activity, and describes the vision so well that his account is well worth repeating. It was on his way from Malta to Sicily that he first caught sight of the volcano, ninety miles away, rising in solitary state behind the nearer mountains. He continued his course till abreast of Syracuse, “with Etna as distant as ever.”]
The fourth morning dawned, and—great Neptune be praised!—we were actually within the Gulf of Catania. Etna loomed up in all his sublime bulk, unobscured by cloud or mist, while a slender jet of smoke, rising from his crater, was slowly curling its wreaths in the clear air, as if happy to receive the first beam of the sun. The towers of Syracuse, which had mocked us all the preceding day, were no longer visible; the land-locked little port of Augusta lay behind us; and, as the wind continued favorable, ere long we saw a faint white mark at the foot of the mountain. This was Catania.
The shores of the bay were enlivened with orange-groves and the gleam of the villages, while here and there a single palm dreamed of its brothers across the sea. Etna, of course, had the monarch’s place in the landscape, but even his large, magnificent outlines could not usurp all my feelings. The purple peaks to the westward and farther inland had a beauty of their own, and in the gentle curves with which they leaned towards each other there was a promise of the flowery meadows of Enna....
Catania presented a lovely picture as we drew near its harbor. Planted at the very foot of Etna, it has a background such as neither Naples nor Genoa can boast. The hills next the sea are covered with gardens and orchards, sprinkled with little villages and the country-places of the nobles,—a rich, cultured landscape, which gradually merges into the forests of oak and chestnut that girdle the waist of the great volcano. But all the wealth of southern vegetation cannot hide the footsteps of that Ruin, which from time to time visits the soil. Half-way up the mountain-side is dotted with cones of ashes and cinders, some covered with the scanty shrubbery which centuries have called forth, some barren and recent; while two dark, winding streams of sterile lava descend to the very shore, where they stand congealed in ragged needles and pyramids. Part of one of these black floods has swept the town, and, tumbling into the sea, walls one side of the port.