THE REALISATION OF THE INFERNO.

Southern Cross, Volume 10, Issue 10, 7 June 1902, Page 11

THE REALISATION OF THE INFERNO.

The destruction of St. Pierre, Martinique, has revived interest in volcanic eruptions generally, and therefore in volcanoes. Reference has been made to the great outburst of Vesuvius, the terrible, in 1872, and mention of this King of Volcanoes leads oife to the library shelf. Vesuvius was born the day that Pompeii died, A.r>. 79, and it is perhaps the only volcano in the world that has been a large source of revenue to the people owning it. There are three great things in Italy that exceed expectations —Vesuvius, St. Peter’s, and the Coliseum. Out of each, millions have been raked in by obliging caterers to the public curiosity, but the volcano has gained the greatest popularity, and Naples, as it stands to-day, is an evidence of the fact. It s a little world of lava, a city’mf lava built on streets of lava —lava statues, lava drinking troughs, and even lava bric-a-brac and jewellery. As you beheld Vesuvius a few years ago it was a pillar of smoke by day and a crescent of hre b} night, and the latter was the lava flood of 1895, which was still moving slowly a whole year later. It takes three and a half hours to climb Vesuvius, as far as the Observatory —a handsome building standing sharply out against the sky on the spur of a mountain 2,200 feet above the sea ; and it is from the balcony of this that you get your first idea of the immensity, horror, and unimaginable force of the mighty vent named. The green plains and blue bay are at your feet, and the tiny ships and bouses seem like nursery models lighted up by a full grown sun and covered by a full grown sky. You behold Torre del Greco, Resina, Portica, and Naples, and to the left sis miles off a black spot —that was Pompeii. Torre del Greco has been overwhelmed and burnt to cinders sixteen times, and it is startling to read : “ The seventeenth city rests on the sixteenth lava flow.” You are allowed to approach the crater, and when you are where the guide has placed you, you see an oval 520 ft long and 450 ft wide, with a jagged, uneven run of rocks blazing with sulphur and spouting steam through the crevices. And the smoke drifts and eddies here, there, and everywhere, and nearly blinds you, and half sufficates you, and it is only in intervals that you see the frightful chasm before you, and at other times you are afraid to move a step. When you do it is to return to some place where you can breathe awhile something like fresh air, and with this in your lungs you behold what that crater is responsible for, in addition to the destroyed cities mentioned, a sea of lava, billows, breakers, and hillocks of lava, lava which was once white hot and angry, but which is now chilled and rigid atone. And when that lava flowed in its most devouring torrent it travelled at the rate of a mile a minute, and it was so hot that it melted copper and silver, and even flint, as far as four miles from its borders. The sight of Mt. Vesuvius in peace times is likened to the realisation of one of Core’s pictures of the Inferno; what it is at other times no pen or pencil can describe.