FARMING A VOLCANO.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19645, 14 June 1929, Page 10

FARMING A VOLCANO.

MT. VESUVIVS WAVES IIER PLUME. (By Nellie M. Scanlan.) NAPLES, April 12. Vesuvius wears a feather in her hat, a trailing, white plume that droop ' OTer her shoulder like a Gainsborough aristocratic. But Vesuvius is not a perfect lack; she makes noises in her inside. She is a bewitching mountain, however, and for thousand* of years she has stood guard over the Bar of Naples. Yet, like the vampire she is, she haa Bprcad death and desolation about her. I walked through Pompeii, among the broken columns and shattered monuments, the roofless houses, the courtyards, the bleached skeletons lying in their doorways, just as they had been struck down 2000 years ago. i*cavation still goes on, and the reconstruction of the life of that period is dailv being perfected by a scrap of pottery here, a piece of metal, a tile, the ancient art and domestic equipment revealed beneath two thousand years of ashes. Pompeii is dead, very dead. It seemed too dead even to have a ghost amidst its ruins. Overwhelmed in its pride and wealth, its pleasures and its sins, Pompeii was wiped out by Vesuvius. But a new Pompeii has arisen beside it. And though the volcano constantly waves its eruptive plume as a perpetual reminder of its power, trusting Neapolitans make their home in the track of the lava, farm its scorched sides, and NaDles. onj of the great ports ot Europe, nourishes in the great Bay at 1 "it takes four separate railways to transport you from Naples to the crater of Vesuvius —an ordinary tram, a eogwhee'ed funicular, an electric train, and finally a cable car straight up the precipitous sides of the crater. Here you look down into the great basin of lava, now cold and set, but its sides are steaming and streaked with sulphur, and a rim of snow tipped the outer edge. In the centre of this basin riaes a cone, from the centre of which a great plume of white smoke rolls and flurries and trails away into the wind. Every three minntes to-day there was a roar of distant thunder, a "boom" deep in ita throat, and a tongue of flame shot up, tingeing the smoke and making it a luminous cloud like the fleecy woolpacks that haunt the sunrise." With each explosion within, a shower of stones flew out, and rattled down the side of the cone. Momentarily, there is a lull, the colour is drained away from the smoke, and the volume decreases until the next grumbling thunder within the mountain heralds the burst of flames and the rush of lurid smoke that weaves fantastic patterns as it rolls and tumbles in great frothy waves. I haTe seen nothing like it. ~,,..,. , v All down the sides are piled high tae streams of lava, which after many years become most fertile soil. A farm of scoria with seven goats tethered to a wine barrel on the side of a volcano does not sound opulent. But all about its feet, and high up the aides are vineyards and gardens and goats. Peas and beans were breaking through the soil in even rows, beneath a perfect roof of grapevines about eight feet high. And above these were the misty pinks of peach and cherry blossom, apples and almond blossom. On wire lines outside the queer stone houses, the spaghetti was hanging out to dry, like hemp outside a flax milL The guard of the little funicular railway plucked a handful of the rosemary that grows wild among the scoria and rock, and gave it to us; a fragrant herbage from so barren a soiL I don't know how high Vesuviua was before she first blew her head off. She is only about 3,000 feet now, but she looks more, rising in solitary grandeur over the Bay. Naples is a beautiful harbour, but tradition has hung a veil of romance about it. To tell the truth, we of the overseas have harbours of greater beauty of which poets haTe not yet sung. And along the rock-paved streets of Naples, that skirt the Bay is the merry jingle of bells. Every horse and mule, and even the tiny donkeys have their chain of tinkling bells. In the wine carts, the horse between the shafts wears an elaborate erection of silvery metal, trimmed with ribbon and edged with fur, and often with tiny statues let in. The whole is sometimes two or three feet high, and it is fringed with bells. On either side of the horse you may see tiny donkeys pulling on the trace, with bellg tinkling beneath their stupid little faces. Out in the harbour lies the Island of Capri, the ancient Isle of Sirens who lured sailors to their doom. To-day, if we may believe our novelists, it' is a place of no lily-white repute; the refuge of artists, and the haunt of the depraved.