250 Voijage of the Novara. 



bare to the very summit. At the first gkmce one could 

 ahnost fancy he gazed on an expanse of snow amid a green 

 forest, so bleached and greyish- white did everything look, 

 owing to the rocks being pulverized and changed by the 

 vapours which continually issued from the soil. Above these 

 white desolate masses of rock were distinguishable the black- 

 ened, charred, knotted stems of bushes and trunks of trees, 

 the relics of the vegetation formerly here, tokens of the last 

 eruption in 1846, in which this King's Crater threw up boiling 

 mud, impregnated with sulphur, besides sand and stones, till 

 throughout an extended area the green forests on every side 

 were killed or desolated. Already however the rich green of 

 the fern, and the Thihaudia (not unlike our own whortle- 

 berry), is seen shooting up amidst the bare stones, in close 

 proximity to the blackened trees and shrubs, charred and 

 altered by the action of the sulphureous vapours and the soil, 

 impregnated as it is with sulphur. 



" Continuing to scramble forward, we reached in safety the 

 floor of the Poison Crater, and had to observe the greatest 

 vigilance, for the entire ground around the boiling lake in 

 the crater to the steep walls consists of nothing but smoking 

 solfataras, or a dense crust of sulphur, full of holes and fissures, 

 over the cooled surface of which the traveller walks, con- 

 stantly in danger of breaking through, not indeed into a 

 fathomless abyss, but into boiling hot, bitter water, in which 

 we would counsel no one to take a foot-bath. If the crust be 

 broken off, there are seen shining beneath the most exquisite 



