Di Capri la marina

E di Napoli il porto e Mergellina.”

It was an extinct volcano, and had been so for unknown ages. Nor did it exhibit its present characteristic cone, nor probably its double top; Vesuvius and Somma were most likely one; and the deep half-moon-shaped ravine of the Atrio del Cavallo, which now divides them, is thought to be a relic of the ancient crater. That crater was a huge amphitheatrical depression, several miles in circuit, filled with pasture-lands and tangled woods. Spartacus and his servile army had used it not long before as a natural fortress. But this feature was scarcely visible to the spectator at Capri, opposite the mountain, to whom the summit must have appeared as a broad flat-topped ridge, in shape and height very similar to the Table Mountain at the Cape of Good Hope.

At the time in question, scarcely a few vague traditions remained to record the fact that the mountain had once “burnt.” The fiery legends of Magna Græcia related to the country west of Naples, where volcanic action had been more recent: the Phlegræan fields, the Market-place of Vulcan (Solfatara), the cone of Gnarime (Ischia), through which the imprisoned Typhœus breathed flame, from whence he has been since transferred to Vesuvius, as a Genoese monk informed us when we and he first looked on that volcano together. Vesuvius awoke from his sleep of unknown length, as every one knows, in A.D. 79, when he celebrated his resumption of authority by that grand “extra night” of the 24th August, which has had no rival since, in the way of pyrotechnical entertainment, except on the distant shores of Iceland, the West Indies, and the Moluccas. His period of activity lasted nearly a thousand years. Then he relapsed into lethargy for six hundred. In 1631, he had resumed (as old prints show), something nearly resembling the form which we have attributed to him in classical times. His top, of great height, swollen up by the slow accumulation of burning matter, without a vent, was a level plateau, with a pit-like crater, filled with a forest of secular oaks and ilexes: only a few “fumaroles,” or smoke-holes, remained here and there to attest his real character. Even the legends of his conflagrations had become out of date. The old “Orearch” or mountain-spirit, Vesevus, is portrayed by the local poet Pontanus in the fifteenth century, as a rustic figure, with a bald head, hump back, and cincture of brushwood—all fiery attributes omitted. Even his terrible name was only known to the learned: the people called him the “Monte di Somma.” The suburban features of a great luxurious city, convents, gardens, vineyards, hunting-grounds, and parks of the nobility, had crept again up the sides of the mountain, until they almost mingled with the trees on the summit. The approaching hour was not without its premonitory signs, many and strange. The phenomena which Bulwer makes his witch of Vesuvius recount, by way of warning, to Arbaces, are very closely borrowed from contemporary narratives of the eruption of 1631. Nor were the omens of superstition wanting, accommodated to the altered feelings of the times. At the Plinian eruption, the people imagined that the old giants buried in the Phlegræan fields had risen again, and renewed their battle with the gods: “for many phantoms of them,” says Dio Cassius, “were seen in the smoke, and a blast, as of trumpets, was heard.” In 1631, carriages full of devils were seen to drive, and battalions of diabolical soldiers to gather in marching array along the precipitous flanks of the mountain. The footsteps of unearthly animals were tracked on the roads. “A peasant of the name of Giovanni Camillo” (so we are informed by the Jesuit Giulio Cesare Recupito, a contemporary), “had passed Easter Eve at a farm-house of his own on the mountain. There, without having taken a mouthful of anything, he was overtaken by a profound slumber, from which awakening suddenly, he saw no longer before his eyes the likeness of the place where he had fallen asleep, but a new heaven, a new soil, a new landscape: instead of a hill-side covered with wood, there appeared a wall crossing the road, and extending on each side for a great distance, with a very lofty gate. Astonished at this new scene, he went to the gate to inquire where he was. There he found a porter of the order of St Francis, a young man in appearance. Many conjecture that this was St Antony of Padua. The porter at first seemed to repulse him, but afterwards admitted him into the courtyard, and guided him about. After a long circuit they arrived at a great range of buildings breathing fire from every window.” In short, the poor peasant was conducted, after the fashion of such visions, through the mansions of hell and purgatory, where he saw, of course, many of his acquaintance variously tormented. “At last, on the following day, he was restored to himself, and to Vesuvius: and was ordered to inform his countrymen that a great ruin was impending over them from that mountain: wherefore they should address their vows and prayers to God. On Easter Day, at noon, he came home, and was observed of many with his dress sprinkled with ashes, his face burnt black, as if escaped from a fire.” This was two years before the eruption, and during the interval Camillo always told the same story; wherefore, after passing a long time for either mad or drunk, he was finally raised to the dignity of a prophet. At last, on the night of the 15th December, the ancient volcano signalised his awakening by a feat of unrivalled grandeur. In forty-eight hours of terrific struggles, he blew away the whole cap of the mountain; so that, on the morning of the 18th, when the smoke at last subsided, the Neapolitans beheld their familiar summit a thousand feet lower than it had been before; while its southern face was seamed by seven distinct rivers of fire, slowly rolling at several points into the sea.

Since 1631, the frequency, if not the violence, of the eruptions seems to have gradually increased, and Vesuvius is probably more “active” now, in local language, than at any former time in his annals, having made the fortunes of an infinity of guides and miscellaneous waiters on Providence within the last twelve years, besides burning a forest or two, and expelling the peasantry of some villages. But his performances on a grand scale seem for the present suspended. Frequent eruptions prevent that accumulation of matter which produces great ones. Indeed, the late Mr Laing, whose ‘Notes of a Traveller’ show him to have been that identical “sturdy Scotch Presbyterian whig” who visited Oxford in company with Lockhart’s Reginald Dalton, “reviling all things, despising all things, and puffing himself up with all things,” deliberately pronounced the volcano a humbug, and believed the depth of its subterranean magazines to be extremely trifling. Still, the curious traveller, like that fabulous Englishman who visited the lion-tamer every night for the chance of seeing him devoured, cannot help looking with a certain eagerness for the occurrence of those two interesting catastrophes, of which the day and hour are written down in the book of the Fates—that combination of high tide, west wind, and land-flood, which is to drown St Petersburg; that combination of south-east wind and first-class eruption which is to bury Naples in ashes. This finale seemed nearer in that recent eruption of December 1860, which spent its fury on Torre del Greco, than perhaps on any former occasion; but once more the danger passed away.

To return, however, from this digression, which has nothing to excuse it except the interest which clings even to often-repeated stories respecting the popular old volcano. Other features in that wonderful panorama, seen from Capri, have undergone scarcely inferior changes since the time of Tiberius. Yonder rich tract of level land at the mouth of the Sarno, between Torre dell’ Annunziata and Castellamare, did not exist. The sea has retreated from it. Tiberius saw, instead of it, a deep bay washing the walls of the compact little provincial city of Pompeii. But the neighbouring port of Stabiæ is gone: not a vestige of its site remains. Above it to the right, Monte Sant’Angelo, and the limestone sierra of which it forms a part, remain, no doubt, unchanged by time. Only that marvellous range of Roman villas and gardens which lined its foot for leagues, almost rivalling the structures of the opposite Bay of Baiæ for magnificence, has disappeared, no one knows how or when. The diver off the coast of Sorento can touch with his hand the long ranges of foundation-work, brick and marble, which now lie many feet beneath the deep clear water. It was a strange fit of short-lived magnificence, that which induced the grandest of millionnaires, the chiefs of the Augustan age, to raise their palaces, all round the Gulf of Naples, on vaulted ranges of piles laid within the sea, so that its luxurious ripple should be heard under the rooms in which they lived. Niebuhr, who, with all his curious insight into the ways of antiquity, was not superior to the temptation of finding a new reason for everything, asserts that they did so in order to escape the malaria. But that mysterious evil influence extended some way beyond the shore. The country craft will, to this day, keep as far as they can, in the summer nights, off the coast of the Campagna, while the quiet land-breeze is wafting death from the interior. The real causes were, doubtless, what the writers of the time disclose. The land close to the shore was dear and scanty, and ill-accommodated for building, from its steepness. The first new-comer who set the fashion of turning sea into land, was imitated by others in the mere wantonness of wealth, until the whole shore became lined with palatial edifices, like the Grand Canal of Venice; but not so durably. These classical structures, frequently delineated with more or less detail in the Pompeian frescoes, were as beautiful and as transitory as those of our dreams; or like the vision which Claude Lorraine transferred to canvass in the most poetical of landscapes, his ‘Enchanted Palace.’ Judging from the singular phenomena exhibited by the ‘Temple of Serapis,’ and by other topographical records, geologists have concluded that land and sea, in this volcanic region, wax and wane in long successions of ages. Thus the sea rose (or rather the land sank) on the coast of the Bay of Naples for about eleven centuries previous to A.D. 1000; then the reverse movement took place until about A.D. 1500: and the land is now sinking again. If so, these marine palaces must have gradually subsided into the sea, and their owners may have been driven out by the invasion of cuttle-fish and sea-hedgehogs, and other monsters of the Mediterranean shallows, in their best bedrooms, even before Norman or Saracen incursions had reduced them to desolation. But whatever the cause of their disappearance, they had vanished before modern history began: nor has modern luxury, in its most profuse mood, ever sought to reproduce them. Their submarine ruins remain as memorials of ages when men were at all events more daring and earnest in their extravagance, and the “lust of the eye and the pride of life” were deified on a grander scale, than at any other epoch of the world’s history.

Naples herself, the “idle” and the “learned” (for the ancients called her somewhat inconsistently by both epithets, nor had she as yet acquired her more recent soubriquet of the “beautiful”), formed a far less conspicuous object in the view than now; it was a place of some twenty or thirty thousand souls, according to Niebuhr’s conjectural estimate; confined between the modern Mole on the one hand, and the Gate del Carmine on the other; and nestling close in the neighbourhood of the sister city Herculaneum. The lofty line of the houses on the Chiaia—of which you may now almost count the windows in the top storeys from the sea-level at Capri, through that pellucid atmosphere, while the lower storeys are hidden by the earth’s curvature—did not then exist. But instead of it there extended the endless terraces and colonnades, the cypress avenues and plane groves, of that range of fortress-palaces erected by Pollio and Lucullus, enlacing island, and beach, and ridge, even to the point of Posilippo, with tracery of dazzling marble. Here, however, the mere natural changes have been small, except that an island or two (like that of the Castel dell’ Uovo) has since been joined to the continent. But farther west, round the Bay of Baiæ, fire and water have dealt most fantastically with the scenery. Scarcely a prominent feature on which the Roman eye rested remains unchanged. Quiet little Nisida was a smoking semi-volcano. Yonder level dun-coloured shore, from Pozzuoli to the Lucrine, was under water, and the waves dashed against a line of cliff now some miles inland. That crater-shaped Lake of Agnano, now the common resort of Neapolitan holiday-makers, did not exist; it must have been formed by some unrecorded convulsion of the dark ages. Yonder neatly truncated cone, rising five hundred feet above the plain, seems as permanent a feature in the landscape as any other of the “everlasting hills;” but it was the creation of a few days of violent eruption, only three centuries ago—as its name of Monte Nuovo still indicates—whether by “upheaval” or by “ejection,” philosophers dispute. But the beautiful Lucrine Lake, the station of Roman fleets and the very central point of Roman luxury, disappeared in the same elemental commotion; leaving a narrow stagnant pool behind. Only yon slight dyke or barrier of beach, between this shrunken mere and the sea, deserves respect; for that has remained, strange to say, almost unaltered throughout. It is one of the very oldest legendary spots of earth; doubtless the very road along which Hercules dragged the oxen of Geryon; the very “narrow shore” on which Ulysses landed, in order to call up the melancholy shades of the dead. Farther inland, again, Avernus remains unchanged, in shape at least; but many and strange are the revolutions which it has undergone in other respects. We first hear of it as a dark pool, surrounded by forests; the bed, doubtless, of an ancient crater filled with water, and retaining much of volcanic action; but not (as commonly supposed) fatal to the birds that flew over it. That notion is not classical; or rather, it is founded on a misconception of classical authorities. The pool is not called by the best writers “lacus Avernus” but “lacus Averni,” the lake of the Avernus. What is an Avernus? Lucretius tells us that it is a spot where noxious gases escape from the earth, so that the birds which fly over it fall dead on the earth or into the lake if there happens to be a lake below them.

“Si forte lacus substratus Averno est.”

And Virgil’s description, accurately construed, gives exactly the same meaning.

“Spelunca alta fuit....