fall back with an injured look, and grasp the
tail, from which I could only loosen him by swinging my staff and
preparing to break his head.

The ascent is easy at first between walls and the vineyards which
produce the celebrated Lachryma Christi. After a half hour we
reached and began to cross the lava of 1858, and the wild desolation
and gloom of the mountain began to strike us. One is here conscious
of the titanic forces at work. Sometimes it is as if a giant had
ploughed the ground, and left the furrows without harrowing them to
harden into black and brown stone. We could see again how the broad
stream, flowing down, squeezed and squashed like mud, had taken all
fantastic shapes,--now like gnarled tree roots; now like serpents in
a coil; here the human form, or a part of it,--a torso or a limb,--in
agony; now in other nameless convolutions and contortions, as if
heaved up and twisted in fiery pain and suffering,--for there was
almost a human feeling in it; and again not unlike stone billows. We
could see how the cooling crust had been lifted and split and turned
over by the hot stream underneath, which, continually oozing from the
rent of the eruption, bore it down and pressed it upward. Even so
low as the point where we crossed the lava of 1858 were fissures
whence came hot air.

An hour brought us to the resting-place called the Hermitage, an
osteria and observatory established by the government. Standing upon
the end of a spur, it seems to be safe from the lava, whose course
has always been on either side; but it must be an uncomfortable place
in a shower of stones and ashes. We rode half an hour longer on
horseback, on a nearly level path, to the foot of the steep ascent,
the base of the great crater. This ride gave us completely the wide
and ghastly desolation of the mountain, the ruin that the lava has
wrought upon slopes that were once green with vine and olive, and
busy with the hum of life. This black, contorted desert waste is
more sterile and hopeless than any mountain of stone, because the
idea of relentless destruction is involved here. This great
hummocked, sloping plain, ridged and seamed, was all about us,
without cheer or relaxation of grim solitude. Before us rose, as
black and bare, what the guides call the mountain, and which used to
be the crater. Up one side is worked in the lava a zigzag path,
steep, but not very fatiguing, if you take it slowly. Two thirds of
the way up, I saw specks of p