third, to a rather heavy gentleman from Naples, whose hospitality
and good-nature have attached him to the expedition, and determined
him to assist in doing the honours of the mountain. The rather
heavy gentleman is carried by fifteen men; each of the ladies by
half-a-dozen. We who walk, make the best use of our staves; and so
the whole party begin to labour upward over the snow, – as if they
were toiling to the summit of an antediluvian Twelfth-cake.
We are a long time toiling up; and the head-guide looks oddly about
him when one of the company – not an Italian, though an habitue of
the mountain for many years: whom we will call, for our present
purpose, Mr. Pickle of Portici – suggests that, as it is freezing
hard, and the usual footing of ashes is covered by the snow and
ice, it will surely be difficult to descend. But the sight of the
litters above, tilting up and down, and jerking from this side to
that, as the bearers continually slip and tumble, diverts our
attention; more especially as the whole length of the rather heavy
gentleman is, at that moment, presented to us alarmingly
foreshortened, with his head downwards.
The rising of the moon soon afterwards, revives the flagging
spirits of the bearers. Stimulating each other with their usual
watchword, ‘Courage, friend! It is to eat macaroni!’ they press
on, gallantly, for the summit.
From tingeing the top of the snow above us, with a band of light,
and pouring it in a stream through the valley below, while we have
been ascending in the dark, the moon soon lights the whole white
mountain-side, and the broad sea down below, and tiny Naples in the
distance, and every village in the country round. The whole
prospect is in this lovely state, when we come upon the platform on
the mountain-top – the region of Fire – an exhausted crater formed
of great masses of gigantic cinders, like blocks of stone from some
tremendous waterfall, burnt up; from every chink and crevice of
which, hot, sulphurous smoke is pouring out: while, from another
conical-shaped hill, the present crater, rising abruptly from this
platform at the end, great sheets of fire are streaming forth:
reddening the night with flame, blackening it with smoke, and
spotting it with red-hot stones and cinders, that fly up into the
air like feathers, and fall down like lead. What words can paint
the gloom and grandeur of this scene!
The broken ground; the smoke; the sense of suffocation from the
sulphur: the fear of falling down through the crevices in the
yawning ground; the stopping, every now and then, for somebody who
is missing in the dark (for the dense smoke now obscures the moon);
the intolerable noise of the thirty; and the hoarse roaring of the
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Dickens, Charles – Pictures From Italy
mountain; make it a scene of such confusion, at the same time, that
we reel again. But, dragging the ladies through it, and across
another exhausted crater to the foot of the present Volcano, we
approach close to it on the windy side, and then sit down among the
hot ashes at its foot, and look up in silence; faintly estimating
the action that is going on within, from its being full a hundred
feet higher, at this minute, than it was six weeks ago.
There is something in the fire and roar, that generates an
irresistible desire to get nearer to it. We cannot rest long,
without starting off, two of us, on our hands and knees,
accompanied by the head-guide, to climb to the brim of the flaming
crater, and try to look in. Meanwhile, the thirty yell, as with
one voice, that it is a dangerous proceeding, and call to us to
come back; frightening the rest of the party out of their wits.
What with their noise, and what with the trembling of the thin
crust of ground, that seems about to open underneath our feet and
plunge us in the burning gulf below (which is the real danger, if
there be any); and what with the flashing of the fire in our faces,