1872 LETTER TO TYNDALL 75 



I had half a mind to write to Tulloch to tell him that I 

 can't and won't take any such office, but I should look 

 rather foolish if he replied that it was a mere newspaper 

 report, and that nobody intended to put me up. 



Egypt interested me profoundly, but I must reserve 

 the tale of all I did and saw there for word of mouth. 

 From Alexandria I went to Messina, and thence made an 

 excursion along the lovely Sicilian coast to Catania and 

 Etna. The old giant was half covered with snow, and 

 this fact, which would have tempted you to go to the 

 top, stopped me. But I went to the Val del Bove, 

 whence all the great lava streams have flowed for the last 

 two centuries, and feasted my eyes with its rugged 

 grandeur. Prom Messina I came on here, and had the 

 great good fortune to find Vesuvius in eruption. Before 

 this fact the vision of good Bence Jones forbidding much 

 exertion vanished into thin air, and on Thursday up I 

 went in company with Bay Lankester and my friend 

 Dohrn's father, Dohrn himself being unluckily away. 

 We had a glorious day, and did not descend till late at 

 night. The great crater was not very active, and con- 

 tented itself with throwing out great clouds of steam and 

 volleys of red -hot stones now and then. These were 

 thrown towards the south-west side of the cone, so that it 

 was practicable to walk all round the northern and eastern 

 lip, and look down into the Hell Gate. I wished you were 

 there to enjoy the sight as much as I did. No lava was 

 issuing from the great crater, but on the north side of 

 this, a little way below the top, an independent cone had 

 established itself as the most charming little pocket- 

 volcano imaginable. It could not have been more than 

 100 feet high, and at the top was a crater not more than 

 six or seven feet across. Out of this, with a noise exactly 

 resembling a blast furnace and a slowly-working high 

 pressure steam engine combined, issued a violent torrent 

 of steam and fragments of semi-fluid lava as big as one's fist, 

 and sometimes bigger. These shot up sometimes as much as 



