Color at Vesuvius (1905)

by Corwin Knapp Linson

Color at Vesuvius

And Other Impressions of a Week at the Crater

By Corwin Knapp Linson

With pictures by the Author

rom the heights above the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele at Naples there stretches before one a beautiful panorama. Over the housetops and domes and clamorous streets, tenderly brilliant beneath the azure of the southern sky; over the curving bay; across the stretch of plain and straggling village street; past gardens of vine and fig clustering about the white dots of houses; even unto the very mountain slopes, the view is never obstructed, but runs on and up to the sullen cloud that unceasingly trails its indolent length seaward. At one end of the picture a gay Neapolitan riot of color, at the other gray ash and harsh lava rock, with patches of smoky yellow where sulphur lies, and here and there rich mottlings of lower tones of black and bronze and orange-red.

The Funicular Railway climbs the cone like an immense steel ladder. The upper station is a little shed of a thing, as grimy and black as a coal-breaker, some hundred feet or more from the crater. Its proximity is startlingly suggested by the thundering challenge from above, and also by the intense heat and the numerous fumerole—little holes and fissures underfoot which give out nauseous odors and intense heat.

Pouring from the crater, when I reached the station, were swelling volumes of smoke and white vapor, following upon explosions that sent great stones and fragments of hot lava hundreds of feet into the air, while cinders fell about me like a dry, black rain. It seemed more than ever an impertinence to think of making pictures of so unearthly a spectacle.

All vision and hearing absorbed in what was taking place, I stood, half suffocated at times by the swirling fumes. With a far-away and insistent turbulence, a dull booming came from the depths. The mountain seemed about to be rent in pieces—an impression no doubt due to the reverberations of sound-waves as the noise grew in volume, with a rattling and cracking as from a thousand rifles in succession, and a thunderous clamor as the flying rocks hurtled one against another. The up shot a swift cloud of cinders, lapilli, and lava fragments, turning the blue into a dirty dun through which the sun gleamed luridly. I had placed myself windward, yet I watched the falling rocks with a vigilant eye and some apprehension. I saw heedless visitors escape the hot shot by not five yards, and one great projectile fell near by plowing its way into the earth and lying smoking and half buried. A moment of quiet followed, and then another explosion tore its way upward, pouring forth a coiling black cloud that blotted out the blue sky.

At first there were no stones at all on the south side. On the second night the wind changed, and the next day saw the ground black with them. Where I had worked, a huge piece of lava lay deep in the ash, with a long furrow behind it. It looked like iron slag. Others, striking the outer edge, had rolled don the smooth outer slope of the cone, leaving twisted tracks that wound out of sight.

The highest point on the summit was a projection of lava perforated like an immense composite chimney, continually giving out vapors and heat. All about the largest hole were mineral deposits in a

pattern of old rose, lemon, orange, red, greenish bronze, and black. To put one’s head over this opening would be to challenge death. But I used the heap to better advantage, gazing from its elevation over the vibrant expanse of blue hills and flashing sea, with the sun glistening on the white cities that girdle the bay as with gems. Far below lay Pompeii, a black scar on the plain, the one wound on a fair land. But, turning about, I looked into a most awful chasm, an appalling abyss, a ghastly hole that appeared to be hundreds of feet across when the ever-shifting masses of smoke and steam cleared sufficiently to afford a view of the opposite side. No one visit ever gave me that view. It was only after repeated observation from all sides, as the veering wind permitted, that I gained my final impression of that awful opening. The columns of rolling smoke, the clouds of white vapor, for most of the time hid from sight all but the immediate brownish-purple and yellow foreground, and its abrupt fall into the unknown.

Half-tone plate engraved by C. W. Chadwick
Naples and Vesuvius, from the heights North of the City

Sometimes jagged rocks would appear, seared and stained and intensely forbidding in their suggestion of venomous life, as though they were the nests of serpents, so hideous was their slimy, glistening character and color. Mineral deposits,—yellow sulphur and white salt, —gray ashes, blackened and torn lava rocks carved into fantastic shapes, combined to give it this appearance. And the stupendous mystery of the source of all this horror, the eternal menace of it, the uncertainty of its action, and the certainty of its results, so grew upon me that my last ascents were made by sheer force of will, and I dreaded contact with a scene that was too awful ever to become familiar. I wondered of what stuff the imperturbable guides could be made; but certain I am that few of them enjoyed their environment.

I went down to the verge. The brink was treacherously soft, with its coating of shifty ash on the ledge of lava overhanging the gulf; so, cautiously braced and bending forward less than a yard from the edge, I got a glimpse of the depths. The muffled muttering was the more impressive because impossible to measure or define. This clamor of unseen forces taps one’s nerves. I could mark the discolored sides of the crater dropping in precipitous incline, seamy, cracked, steaming at points with jets as from escape-valves. I did not linger where at any moment a violent explosion might cause the overhang to slip, as I afterward saw happen. I experienced a thrill, indeed, when, during a visit to Naples in the following year, I learned that the whole ledge upon which I had worked had disappeared within a fortnight of that time.

Half-tone plate engraved by Walter Aikman
Sunset view of Vesuvius in January, showing old and new lava

The ash cone lies like a monster ant-heap on the broad shoulders of the mountain. The streams of lava ooze from holes, slowly following their various courses, congealing soon into weird and curious shapes. Two nights, with my guide, I clambered over the rough and tortuous surface, our torches flaring out into the darkness upon great masses that held a certain grandeur in their silhouettes. Up and down, in and out, carefully feeling for places for our feet, or sometimes making good way over some old and hardened stream, we proceeded, the lava cracking all about us with the contraction of cooling, the under surface still glowing in the crevices. Once there came a sharp report as the top broke open a few feet away, revealing the vivid seam of fire. We soon reached the fresh lava, moving in resistless flow. It was about two yards across, and as flat as a river where it issued at white heat. Farther on it darkened in color, and began to tumble and break and to pile up into ridges and cable-like coils. Beyond this was another stream that came from an opening some ten feet above and formed a cascade of fire. The heat was intense. Issuing thus in molten state, white hot or glowing against the blackness of the night, its light diffused by the rising steam, revealing the uncanny shapes in stone all about, this night view of flowing lava is surely most impressive. There were streams of fire every few yards, and the heat drove us back more than once when the shifting

wind brought the hot blast in our faces. I Was content to remain in one place, watching a phase of nature’s mountain-building that was at once beautiful and dreadful to see. But as the flow has no certainty of movement, and we could not rely on its leaving a solid footing under us from one moment to another, we cautiously retreated. When we had made our way back, I found the soles of my shoes were burned.

From the station I gazed back on-the fiery streams forming a long line of moving red, and sending up a quivering veil of thin, flaming light, that met, high up, the cool darkness of the sky, with its setting of tranquil stars.

When, by day, I went out to study the lava-fields in the Atrio del Cavallo, I worked from the vantage-point of a heaped-up pile of rugged boulders. Two feet below the crust, the interior was at red heat, and I Sat in the cold January wind over a pleasant, comfortable warmth. But to sit over volcanic fires is not the most tranquilizing of experiences, and involuntarily I glanced down now and again. Always I could hear the cracking, with dull thuds, as of thick ice breaking. My guide once jumped to his feet as a new stream burst out not twenty yards away. Having reassured himself that the seam was not extending our way, and that there was no immediate danger, he reseated himself, saying, “It is nothing; but he works hard to-day.”

The lava-fields are among the most extraordinary of Vesuvian phenomena. Rock heaped upon rock,—not ordinary stone, but boulders such as might be made by fusing iron with coal refuse and glass,—rough, jagged rocks armed with teeth and claws and seamed with fire, scoriated, petrified streams, masses of matter resembling a monster’s wrinkled hide, fantastic shapes, they lie jammed together by an irresistible force, twisted, thrown one against another in nightmare confusion.

The vast extent of stony acres under the bright sunlight is blackish gray in color, bare, monotonous, and desolate. At evening the sun gave it a tone of old copper, and the light, gradually fading, left it a dull bronze, deepening in tone until the night infolded it in gloom. Early in the morning, as one looked at it from the observatory, with the sun rising behind the mountain, it had the blue of a plum. It was wonderfully changeable in color, variously affected by every shifting angle of sunlight.

One night at the station the unkind winds brought sulphurous vapors from the crater and from the crevices in the side. The cinders blew against the windows and in between the shutters, playing a rattling tattoo to the accompaniment of the wind’s dreary whistling. The sickening gases penetrated my room, and I covered my face with dampened towels to breathe easily, sitting in the blackness and wondering what other strange and untoward things would happen. In the morning the station area lay under several inches of powdery ashes.

Each successive visit to the crater deepened the feeling of awe with which I had come to regard that bellowing entrance to Inferno. Each day I could get different glimpses into the seething pit, but one day was like another in the fiendish din and smell of it all. I was glad indeed to turn my back upon it, on my last ride down the giddy slope of the Funicular, where it ever seemed as though the rocks below were flying up to smite me in the face. I made one last journey around by the devious paths to the crevices in the side. The blue walls of Monte Somma loomed through the rolling white steam-clouds that rounded up through the giant cracks. These crevices slant at a sharp angle in an almost straight line, bordered by the roughly tumbled lava upon which I stood, colored in brilliant yellows and various reds and blacks. I could not see the side beyond the constantly swelling steam, nor approach within ten yards for the evil smell of the place; and after noting the color-effect in a hasty sketch, I withdrew to a more healthful neighborhood.

For two days the carriage-road had been blocked along almost the whole of its length by the encroaching lava. In order to reach the observatory, near which I remained the last three nights, I was forced to make the intervening mile and a half over the new hot lava, crossing one live stream. At this point it was considerably surface-cooled, but still glowing, and broken into loose fragments and boulders that rolled along underfoot. It was quick work and sure stepping, cool head and hot feet. Glad I was to reach the remnant of good road at the end, hewn out of solid lava, and so find myself at the little house where I was to stay. A buxom matron volubly welcomed me. My room, up a flight of steps, was one of the four in the house. The others were the family bedroom beyond mine, and the kitchen and the donkey-stable below. As I looked in at the little beast quietly munching his fodder, I saw several sedate hens perched comfortably upon his back. In a small building across the road, decorated as to outer walls with a startling representation of Vesuvius ejecting quantities of wine-bottles, I had my supper. As though my senses were not yet sufficiently saturated with ghastly odors, a charcoal fire was fuming at my feet to temper the chill of the evening. But I placed the stifling stuff by the window, which I opened, so that I might eat my macaroni in a sweeter air.

The family were still at the table in the kitchen when I joined them, making merry over bowls of soup and a bottle of wine. The matted heads of the four children bobbed hither and thither as their grimy hands snatched at bits of bread. The elders grinned their enjoyment, and the flickering candle sent out quavering shadows over the dirty white walls and low ceiling covered with utensils and dried herbs. An infrequent flash from some bit of copper struck a bright note in the smoky interior. Here, under the very shadow of Vesuvius, was a happy home and a picture for Rembrandt.

My room was a small one with terracotta walls and turquoise-blue ceiling, containing a bed, a rude armoire, table, and chairs. On the walls were some small photographs, chromos, crude oil portraits and landscapes, and two wax saints under glass. The whole family slept in the other room. As they could get to it only through mine, I had to retire last and be the first out in the morning. How they were stowed away, the four elders and the four children, I could not guess.

That night I saw a magnificent spectacle. I was watching the lava, that, from this new point of view, looked like red claws reaching toward me. Suddenly there shot up from the distant crater, which until now had loomed in somber silhouette against the starry sky, an immense cloud of vapor lighted by the internal fire. It rose in majesty, and slowly floated away. Another came, and repeatedly this splendid illumination reddened the sky above it, accompanied by explosions like claps of thunder. Finally, the whole top was enveloped in a fiery mist, while it emitted blasts of apparent flame for about an hour. And ever there came a low buzzing, humming, throbbing sound, as of a vast mill of thousands of whirling wheels. Each night this ominous hum sounded in the stillness, seeming to come from the ground beneath; and through my pillow the tortured giant groaned this accompaniment to my slumber. Thus, nearly two miles away, on this ledge of natural rock that juts from the mountain like a spur between the lava-beds on each side, one can hear the noise of the subterranean conflict as one cannot even under the mouth of the volcano. I was told that during a violent eruption this hum becomes a dull roaring audible miles away.

On the last day I had occasion to revisit the station. The bridle-path had again been cut through the new lava, still hot, though hardened. I was first to use it, in the early morning, and alone I rode my pony over the rough new path. About midway I heard a now familiar sound up the slope, and saw coming, head on, twelve yards away, what appeared to be a moving stone wall about ten feet wide and six or eight feet high. It was slowly pushing onward, breaking, tumbling, grinding, crunching, implacable. Not ten minutes later, an impassable molten barrier lay across the path behind me, and man’s little labor was rendered once more of no account. Looking westward toward Naples, I saw the long blue shadow of Vesuvius lying out over the valley, the apex just touching the town. Was it not dramatically suggestive, this steely finger stretched daily at the teeming city?