ich took about three quarters of an hour. We were then on the
summit, which is, after all, not a summit at all, but an uneven waste,
sloping away from the Cone in the center. This sloping lava waste was
full of little cracks,--not fissures with hot lava in them, or anything
of the sort,--out of which white steam issued, not unlike the smoke from
a great patch of burned timber; and the wind blew it along the ground
towards us. It was cool, for the sun was hidden by light clouds, but not
cold. The ground under foot was slightly warm. I had expected to feel
some dread, or shrinking, or at least some sense of insecurity, but I
did not the slightest, then or afterwards; and I think mine is the usual
experience. I had no more sense of danger on the edge of the crater than
I had in the streets of Naples.

We next addressed ourselves to the Cone, which is a loose hill of ashes
and sand,--a natural slope, I should say, of about one and a half to
one, offering no foothold. The climb is very fatiguing, because you sink
in to the ankles, and slide back at every step; but it is short,--we
were up in six to eight minutes,--though the ladies, who had been helped
a little by the guides, were nearly exhausted, and sank down on the very
edge of the crater, with their backs to the smoke. What did we see? What
would you see if you looked into a steam boiler? We stood on the ashy
edge of the crater, the sharp edge sloping one way down the mountain,
and the other into the bowels, whence the thick, stifling smoke rose.
We rolled stones down, and heard them rumbling for half a minute. The
diameter of the crater on the brink of which we stood was said to be an
eighth of a mile; but the whole was completely filled with vapor. The
edge where we stood was quite warm.

We ate some rolls we had brought in our pockets, and some of the party
tried a bottle of the wine that one of the cormorants had brought up,
but found it anything but the Lachryma Christi it was named. We looked
with longing eyes down into the vapor-boiling caldron; we looked at
the wide and lovely view of land and sea; we tried to realize our awful
situation, munched our dry bread, and laughed at the monstrous demands
of the vagabonds about us for money, and then turned and went down
quicker than we came up.

We had chosen to ascend to the old crater rather than to the new one of
the recent eruption on the side of the mountain, where there is nothing
to be seen. When we reached th