ETNA.
VESUVIUS is a fashionable volcano. People went "to see the Eruption" this winter, just as they went "to see the Exhibition" last summer ; and yet, if bigness be anything, and it surely ought to be in a mountain, Etna has far greater claims than Vesuvius, which might be hidden away in the Val del Bove, that sterile valley which forms only a portion of the eastern side of the vast volcano, and is itself bounded on three sides by vertical precipices, between three and four thousand feet high. Perhaps its quiescence is against it, as the Bret duty of a volcano is surely to be eruptive, and Etna has been as dull and silent as a theatre by daylight since 1874, the most recent occasion on which, with a mighty roaring and great shocks of earthquake, "that dragon-thing (Typhon) made issue from beneath the terrible, fiery flood." Much visited by scientific personages, rarely by travellers for pleasure only, with a history of 2,400 years, the " Mongibello " of formal Sicilian appellation," Ii Monte," as it is proudly, yet familiarly, called in the peninsula, had not even one English book wholly written in its honour—though many writers describe it in Italian tours—until now, when Mr. Rodwell takes up, in the home of the old myths, that theme of the great ancients, seriously descriptive or gloriously poetic, the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, who was Etna itself, with its one great crater, and the Cyclops, its numerous minor cones.
To get a notion of the size of the most famous of volcanoes, as it rises, solitary in grandeur, with the great sweep of the Alcantara and Simeto valleys between it and the mountain ranges of the Sicilian coast on either side, the unscientific mind, to which measurement is meaningless, will resort to the aid of Professor Jukes, who tells us, "If we were to put Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales, on the top of Ben Nevis, the high- est in Scotland, and Carrantuohill, the highest in Ireland, on the summit of both, we should make a mountain but a very little higher than Etna; and we should require to heap up a great number of other mountains round the flanks of our new one, in order to build a gentle, sloping pile, which should equal Etna in bulk." Its majestic height is, however, less im- posing to the imagination than its vast extent, for " Il Monte" has an area of 462 square miles, "rather larger than that of Bedfordshire," and a population more than double that of the English county. Two cities, Catania and Aci Reale, and sixty- two small towns, cluster upon the slopes of the awful mountain, whose entrails are fire, and whose breath is flame and lightning.
Nine miles beneath the crater, which is 1,000 ft. in depth, three miles in width (it was rent anew into great fissures by the last eruption), the habitable zone commences, and is tenanted by 300,000 souls. Only the Val del Bove, commencing two miles from the summit, where Sir Charles Lyell believes there formerly existed a centre of permanent eruption, is altogether sterile now ; the other sides of the mountain are clothed with trees at the same level. And such trees ! Fourteen separate forests form the Regione Selvosa, and they abound with the oak, beech, pine, and poplar, with the chestnut, the ilex, and the cork-tree. Mariposa and Calaveras cannot beat the " Castagna di Cento Cavalli," in the forest of Carpinetto, on the east side of the mountain, in whose trunk, through which the public road now passes, a Queen of Arragon once took shelter, with a suite of one hundred horsemen. The Regione Coltivata, whose soil consists of decomposed lava, is lavishly fruitful; of the three regions, of which the Deserta has the most powerful charm for the imagination, Brydone says :— "Besides the corn, the wine, the oil, the silk, the spice, and delicious fruits of its lower region; the beautiful forests, the flocks, the game, the tar, the cork, the honey of its second; the snow and ice of its third,—it affords from its caverns a variety of minerals and other productions, cinnabar, mercury, sulphur, alum, nitre, and vitriol ; so that this wonderful mountain, at the same time, produces every necessary and every luxury of life."
The story of the ascent of the mountain, from whose summit Plato, in his serene and, thoughtful time, and Mr. Gladstone, in onr troublous days, have, among many great men, in great wonder, watched the sunrise, has a strong fascination, because of its wide contrast, its stern exaction of strength and endur- ance, and its supreme, awe-inspiring reward,—the realisation of that which inspired the ancients and the poets of the middle- ages. From the banana and the orange groves, from the vine- yards and the palms, through the seven botanical regions into which the botanists have divided the realm protected of Per- sephone—because "amid the billowy cornfields of her mother, Demeter, and the meadow-flowers she loved in girlhood, are ever found sulphurous ravine's, and chasms breathing vapour from the pit of Hades "—to the snow-capped crust that spreads for ten square miles between the awful depth of unquenchable fire, and the blue heaven that suddenly seems to be brought near, the traveller mounts, with an ever-increasing sense of the vastness beyond and around him. When twelve miles of the ascent from Catania have been accomplished, the summit looks as far off as ever. When Mr. Rodwell made the ascent, in August, 1877, no rain had fallen in Sicily for three months, and along the eastern sea-base of the mountain the mean tempera- ture was 82° Fahr. His starting-point was Catania ; his first halt at Nicolosi, a little town, consisting of one long street, bordered by one-storied cottages of lava. Nicolosi has more than once been shaken to the ground by earthquakes. From thence begins the journey, on mule-back, by no defined path, over a vast tract covered with lava and ashes, with here and there patches of broom. The mules know all about it, and wise tra- vellers trust them as they deserve. While his mule bore him unguided up the steep slope of the trackless waste, Mr. Rodwell wrote his notes, and at the time of the setting sun used his pocket spectroscope. Around the district of lava and ashes lie forests of small trees, and at a height of 4,216 feet is the Casa del Bosco, where men in charge of the woods live, and whence the start for quite the upper regions of the mountain—where cold surpassing that of the higher Alps has to be encountered —is made. There, Mr. Rodwell records, "the air was so extra- ordinarily dill, that the flame of a candle placed near the open door of the house did not flicker." At 6,300 feet, the Regione
Deserta is entered ; lifelessness is all around ; silence broods over the waste of black sand, ashes, and lava; ants are the only living creatures in the crater region. A little lower down, Spal- lanzani found jays, thrushes, ravens, kites, and a few partridges. There was no moon on the night on which Mr. Rodwell made the ascent; but as the desolation deepened, and the earth became more arid, and more void and mute, the heavens took up the wondrous tale. "The stars," he says, "shone with extra- ordinary brilliancy, and sparkled like particles of white-hot steel_ I had never before seen the heavens studded with such myriads of stars. The Milky Way shone like a path of fire, and meteors flashed across the sky in such numbers that I soon gave up any attempt to count them. The vault of heaven seemed to be much nearer than when seen from the earth, and more flat, as if only a short distance above our heads, and some of the brighter stars appeared to be hanging down from the sky."
A hundred years ago, Brydone, beholding this same wondrous spectacle of "awful majesty and splendour," records how he and his companion were "more struck with veneration than below;" how they exclaimed together, "What a glorious situation for an observatory ! had Empedodes had the eyes of Galileo, what dis- coveries must he not have made !" and how they regretted that Jupiter was not visible, as he was persuaded they might have discovered some of his satellites with the naked eye, or at least with a small glass which he had in his pocket. There is every probability that next year will see an observatory at the Casa Inglese, a small lava-house near the base of the cone of the- great crater, built by the English officers stationed in Sicily in 1811.
At 1.30 a.m., with the temperature at 4° Fahr., Mr. Rodwell' reached the welcome shelter of the Casa Tnglese, and rested there until 3 a.m., when, the brighter stars having disappeared,. he started for the summit of the great crater, 1,200 ft. above him, in order to witness what Brydone calls "the most wonder- ful and most sublime sight in Nature." There was no strong wind, the traveller did not suffer from the sickness of which travellers constantly complain in the rarefied air of the summit. He reached the highest point at 4.40, and cautiously choosing a coolish plate among the cinders, sat down on the ground, whence steam and sulphurous-acid gas were issuing, to wait for the sunrise :—" Above the place where the sun would presently appear there was a brilliant red, shading off in the- direction of the zenith to orange and yellow; this was succeeded by pale green, then a long stretch of pale blue, darker blue, dark grey, ending opposite the rising sun with black. This effect was quite distinct ; it lasted some minutes, and was very re- markable. This was succeeded by the usual rayed appearance, and at ten minutes to five the upper limb of the sun was seen over the mountains of Calabria." So simply does Mr. Rodwell record the gaerdon of his toil, for as he says truly, no one would have the hardihood to attempt to describe the impressions which are made upon the mind while the eyes are beholding the sunrise from the summit of Etna. How greatly the isolation of the awful mountain adds to the incommunicable effect Brydone im- plies, when he dwells upon "the immense elevation from the surface of the earth, drawn, as it were, to a single point, with- out any neighbouring mountains for the senses and imagina- tion to rest upon and recover from their astonishment, in their way down to the world." It must be a wonderful experience to turn from such a contemplation to gaze into the vast, preci- pitous abyss of the great crater, even when it is quiet, as on this occasion. In 1838, when Mr. Gladstone made the ascent, the fire-forces were in activity, and he witnessed a " slight " eruption, involving such trifles as lava-masses 200 lb. in weight being thrown a distance of a mile and a half, and a black column of ashes being shot from time to time out of the utter- most depths of the crater far above its edge.
The minor craters look small in comparison with the great mass of the mountain, but in reality some of them are of great size—as, for instance, the double mountain, called "Monti Rossi," from the red cinders that compose it—and are richly covered with vegetation. Seventy-eight eruptions are recorded since Etna has had a history, the earliest in the time of Pythagoras, the most recent in 1874; of these, Mr. Rod- well remarks that not more than nineteen have been of extreme violence, while the majority have been of a slight and comparatively harmless character. The ancient, immortal, one-eyed giant keeps up the character of the race for good- nature.
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