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
