Mountain Journeys 73 



Sayve felt that he was breathing with difficulty; in spite of the cold, 

 he felt very acute thirst; however, a little rest restored his strength. 



But the scene was to be changed .... The route passes by a 

 hut of refuge, which is at the foot of the cone, and which is the highest 

 building in all Europe (9,200 feet) .... From there up to the summit 

 there is only an absolutely bare cone, 1,300 feet high. 



As our traveller climbed this cone of the crater, he felt his 

 distress increase, and was obliged to stop at nearly every step. He 

 felt extraordinary weakness in all his limbs; he was nauseated, and 

 thinking that he had left the element suited to his physical nature, 

 he tried, he says, to inhale a little air, but could not succeed at this 

 critical moment; and yet he was perfectly healthy when he began his 

 ascent; his passage through the region of snow had tired him very 

 little; the symptoms he felt can therefore be attributed only to the 

 rarefaction of the air. 



M. Aubert-du-Petit-Thouars . . . told the author that he had 

 felt similar symptoms, especially a weakness in the stomach, when he 

 climbed the mountain in the He de Bourbon, known as the Benard. 



M. Cloquet, moreover, himself experienced symptoms of this sort, 

 when he reached a certain height in the Alps .... 



M. de Sayve had with him a companion who was much more 

 severely affected; and we know that the unfortunate Dolomieu, in the 

 same ascent, was also attacked by symptoms like those which we have 

 just mentioned .... 



These different symptoms are quite varied and appear sooner in 

 some persons than in others; but they cannot be attributed to fatigue, 

 which never has such consequences in mountains of an elevation less 

 than 1,000 fathoms. 



Moreover, they appear alike in animals and men. 



I shall not give more quotations. More recent authors show the 

 same differences in power of observation, and most of them say 

 nothing about physiological disturbances. What I have reported is 

 enough to show that Etna is, if I may use this term, a limited 

 mountain, in the ascent of which many persons experience no 

 painful symptom, whereas others are more or less ill. Since the 

 first symptoms of distress are exactly those of excessive fatigue, 

 the difficulties of the ascent of the cone are consequently enough 

 to explain everything, in the opinion of most of the travellers; 

 some think the cause of the oppression is the poisonous exhalations 

 coming from the volcano through the innumerable fissures in the 

 ground. It is not surprising, then, that before verification of the 

 disease peculiar to mountains, in the main range of the Andes, 

 nothing unusual was noted in ascents of Etna. 



4. Peak of Teneriffe. 



Discovered again in the fourteenth century by French navi- 

 gators, the Canary Islands were conquered in the fifteenth century 



