FARMING A VOLCANO

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 211, 3 June 1929, Page 9

FARMING A VOLCANO

VINEYARDS AND GARDENS MOUNT VESUVIUS WAVES HER PLUME [By Nellie M. Scanlan.] Dominion Special Service. Naples, April 12. Vesuvius wears a feather in her hat, a trailing, white plume that droops over her shoulder like a Gainsborough aristocrat She is a bewitching mountain, and for thousands of years she has stood guard over the Bay of Naples." Yet, like the vampire she is, she has spread death and desolation about her. I walked through Pompeii among the broken columns and Shattered monuments, the roofless uouses, the courts yards, the bleached skeletons lying in their doorways, just as they had been struck down 2000 years ago. Excavation still goes bn, and the reconstruction of: the life of that period is daily 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. But a new Pompeii has arisen vius. 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 Naples, one of the great ports of Europe, flourishes in the great bay at its feet It takes four separate railways to transport you from Naples to the crater of Vesuvius —an ordinary train, a cogwheeled flnicular, 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 rises a cone, from the centre of which a great plume of white smoke rolls and flurries and trails away in the wind. Every three minutes to-day there was a roar of distant thunder, a “boom” deep in its 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 flame, and the gush of lurid smoke that weaves fantastic patterns as -it- rolls and tumbles in great frothy waves. I have seen nothing like it. , . All down the sides are piled high, the streams of lava, which after many years become most fertile soil. A farm, of scoria with sevejrgoats tethered to a wine barrel on the side of a volcano does not sound opnlent. But all about its feet, and high up the sides, 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 peaks of peach and cherry blossom, apple and almond blossom. On wire lines outside the queer stone houses, the spaghetti was_ha_ngingout.tp_.dry,. EkeTiemp outside a flaxmill. The guard of the little financial 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 do not know how high Vesuvius was before she first blew her head off; she is only about 3000 feet now, but she looks more, rising in solitary grandeur oves 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 have 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 ■earts, 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 bells 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.