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?
