The Knickerbocker | Page 6

three times their height; its lower parts are of gentle ascent, but as it rises it becomes more and more steep, until it terminates in a broken summit. Imagine it divided, as the eye ascends, into three regions or belts: the first and lowest is covered with villages, gardens, vineyards, olive-groves, oranges, and fields of grain and flax, and the date-bearing palm. The second region, which commences about four thousand feet above the sea, is called the Regione Sylvosa, or woody region. Here chestnuts, hexes, and on the north pines of great size flourish. This belt reaches to the elevation of about seven thousand feet, where the Regione Scoperta, or bare region, commences. The lower part of this is intermingled lava, rocks, volcanic sands, and snow; still higher are vast fields of spotless snow, which centuries have seen unwasted, with here and there a ridgy crag of black lava, too steep for the snows to lodge upon; and toward the summit of the cone, dark patches of scori? and ashes, which, heated by the slumbering fires, defy the icy blasts of these upper realms of air. It will readily be supposed that, when viewed from a distance, Mount ?tna is an object to make a deep impression on the mind:
But for yon filmy smoke, that from thy crest Continual issues like a morning mist The sun disperses, there would be no sign That from thy mighty breast bursts forth at times The sulphurous storm--the avalanche of fire; That midnight is made luminous, and day A ghastly twilight, by thy lurid breath. By thee tormented, Earth is tossed and riven: The shuddering mountains reel; temples and towers The works of man, and man himself, his hopes His harvests, all a desolation made! Sublime art thou, O Mount! whether beneath The moon in silence sleeping with thy woods, And driving snows, and golden fields of corn; Or bleat on thy slant breast the gentle flocks, And shepherds in the mellow glow of eve Pipe merrily; or when thy scath��d sides Are laved with fire, answered thine earthquake voice By screams and clamor of affrighted men. Sublime thou art!--a resting-place for thought, Thought reaching far above thy bounds; from thee To HIM who bade the central fires construct This wondrous fabric; lifted thy dread brow To meet the sun while yet the earth is dark, And ocean, with its ever-murmuring waves.
On the ninth of May, myself and travelling companion commenced the ascent of Mount ?tna; and as the season was not the most favorable, the snows extending farther down the sides of the mountain than in summer, we were equipped, under the direction of our guide, with coarse woollen stockings to be drawn over the pantaloons, thick-soled shoes, and woollen caps. Mounting our mules, we left Catania in the morning. The road was good and of gradual ascent until we reached Nicolosi, about fourteen miles up the mountain. We saw little that was particularly interesting on our route except that the hamlets through which we passed bore fearful evidences of the effects of earthquake. Arrived at Nicolosi, the place where travellers usually procure guides and mules for the mountain, it was our intention to rest for the remainder of the day; but Monte Rosso, an extinguished crater, being in the vicinity, my curiosity got the better of my intention to rest, and I sallied forth to examine it. The road lay through the village, which is built of the lava, and is arid and black, and many of the buildings rent and twisted. Monte Rosso was formed by the eruption of 1669, which threw out a torrent of lava that flowed thirteen miles, destroying a great part of the city of Catania in its resistless course to the sea, where it formed a rugged promontory which at this day appears as black, bare, and herbless as on the day when its fiery course was arrested by the boiling waters. And here I would remark, that the lavas of ?tna are very different from those of Vesuvius. The latter decompose in half a century, and become capable of cultivation; those of ?tna remain unchanged for centuries, as that of Monte Rosso testifies. It has now been exposed to the action of the weather nearly two hundred years, with the exception of the interstices where the dust and sand have collected, it is destitute of vegetation. Broken in cooling into masses of rough but sharp fracture, its aspect is horrid and forbidding, and it is exceedingly difficult to walk over. If two centuries have produced so little change, how many centuries must have served to form the rich soil which covers the greater part of the mountain's sides and base!
Our purpose was to see the sun rise from the summit of ?tna; and at nine