A CITY BUILT OF LAVA.

Auckland Star, Volume XXX, Issue 76, 1 April 1899, Page 2 (Supplement)

A CITY BUILT OF LAVA.

What Naples owes to Vesuvius it would be difficult to express. It is a world of lava. The city is built of it, and the streets are paved with it. This lava is one of the best building stones known, since it is very durable, costs nothing, and is really worked by stone-cutters who ask and receive nothing in particular by way of wages. These facts explain the mad fancy of the Neapolitan citizens for Stone embankments hundreds of feet high which in any other city would be luxuries only possible to millionaires. The city is largely built upon very precipitous hillsides. One man's garden is often another man's roof. Hillside roads.wide and well paved, run over the roofs of dwellinghouses in places. The usual villa nestles on a shelf, with a back garden of orange trees running to the next man's embankment, and a front garden projecting outward into the blue empyrean. When the playful dog—an imported dog, of course—joyfully frisks about the front garden and carelessly jumps over the low wall, as he has been accustomed to do elsewhere, it becomes immediately necessary to import another dog. He is far, far away in a lower and .less aristocratic portion of the city, and what has become of him only the provision dealers can tell. Lava is everywhere—in streets of, lava, staircases, statues, drinking troughs,bric-a-brac, and jewellery of every conceivable kind. The innumerable donkeys, even, are lava-coloured, and show other indications of their volcanic origin in their hind legs and voices. These, the invariable accompanists of the Neapolitan morning, thrill through the soft air like the note of a lark or a woodbird, but in a different, more Vesuvtan key. And Vesuvius is ever before you. It is a pillar of smoke by day and a crescent of fire by night. TJie smoke comes from the crater, and is now and then lighted by red flashes. The crescent is the lava flood of 1895, still moving, which shows two miles of steam during the daytime, and the same length of gjpwhig redness from dark to dawn.