g at their awful play around
its precipices, veiling the sweet suggestion of distant sea and
happier hills that should be visible, the horror of this view is
aggravated. Breaking here and there, the billows of mist disclose
forlorn tracts of jet-black desolation, wicked, unutterable, hateful
in their hideousness, with patches of smutty snow above, and
downward-rolling volumes of murky smoke. Shakspere, when he imagined
the damned spirits confined to 'thrilling regions of thick-ribbed
ice,' divined the nature of a glacier; but what line could he have
composed, adequate to shadow forth the tortures of a soul condemned
to palpitate for ever between the ridges of this thirsty and
intolerable sea of dead fire? If the world-spirit chose to assume
for itself the form and being of a dragon, of like substance to
this, impenetrable, invulnerable, unapproachable would be its hide.
It requires no great stretch of the imagination to picture these
lava lakes glowing, as they must have been, when first outpoured,
the bellowing of the crater, the heaving and surging of the solid
earth, the air obstructed with cinders and whizzing globes of molten
rock. Yet in these throes of devilish activity, the Val del Bove
would be less insufferable than in its present state of suspension,
asleep, but threatening, ready to regurgitate its flame, but for a
moment inert.

An hour's drive from Nicolosi or Zafferana, seaward, brings one into
the richest land of 'olive and aloe and maize and vine' to be found
upon the face of Europe. Here, too, are laughing little towns,
white, prosperous, and gleeful, the very opposite of those sad
stations on the mountain-flank. Every house in Aci Reale has its
courtyard garden filled with orange-trees, and nespole, and
fig-trees, and oleanders. From the grinning corbels that support the
balconies hang tufts of gem-bright ferns and glowing clove-pinks.
Pergolas of vines, bronzed in autumn, and golden green like
chrysoprase beneath an April sun, fling their tendrils over white
walls and shady loggie. Gourds hang ripening in the steady blaze.
Far and wide stretches a landscape rich with tilth and husbandry,
boon Nature paying back to men tenfold for all their easy toil. The
terrible great mountain sleeps in the distance innocent of fire. I
know not whether this land be more delightful in spring or autumn.
The little flamelike flakes of brightness upon vines and fig-trees
in April have their own peculiar charm. But in