him and at one another with furious gesticulations, and
then tearing off the straps, they hurried up the slope, leaving him
on the middle of the mount to take care of himself.

It might be told how the Senator toiled up slowly but surely, never
stopping till he had gained the summit; or how Buttons, who arrived
there first, spent the time in exploring the mysteries of this
elevated region; or how Dick stopped every twenty paces to rest and
smoke; how he consumed much time and much tobacco; and how he did not
gain the summit until twenty minutes after the serene face of the
Senator had confronted the terrors of the crater.

Before these three there was a wonderful scene. Below them lay the
steep sides of the cone, a waste of hideous ruin--

"Rocks, crags, and mounds confusedly hurled,
The fragments of a ruined world."

Before them was the crater, a vast abyss, the bottom of which was
hidden from sight by dense clouds of sulphurous smoke which forever
ascended. Far away on the other side rose the opposite wall of
abyss--black, rocky cliffs that rose precipitously upward. The side
on which they stood sloped down at a steep angle for a few hundred
feet, and then went abruptly downward. A mighty wind was blowing
and carried all the smoke away to the opposite side of the crater,
so that by getting down into the shelter of a rock they were quite
comfortable.

The view of the country that lay beneath was superb. There lay
Naples with its suburbs, extending for miles along the shore, with
Portici, Castellamare, and the vale of Sorrento. There rose the hills
of Baiae, the rock of Ischia, and the Isle of Capri. There lay
countless vineyards, fields forever green, groves of orange and
fig-trees, clusters of palms and cypresses. Mountains ascended all
around, with many heights crowned with castles or villages. There lay
the glorious Bay of Naples, the type of perfect beauty. Hundreds of
white sails dotted the intense blue of its surface. Ships were
there at anchor, and in full sail. Over all was a sky such as is
seen only in Italy, with a depth of blue, which, when seen in
paintings, seems to the inexperienced eye like an exaggeration.

The guides drew their attention from all this beauty to a solid fact.
This was the cooking of an egg by merely burying it in the hot sand
for a few minutes.

Buttons now proposed to go down into the crater. The guides looked
aghast.

"Why not?"

"Impossible, Signor. It's death.