82 EAMBLES OF A NATURALIST. 



we take, we are traversing or skirting along some 

 more recent lava bed whose arid and upheaved 

 cheire* covers fields which were once as fertile as 

 those which it now intersects in the form of a huge 

 black dyke. Everywhere, by the side of present 

 happiness and wealth, we see the phantom of past 

 desolation and misery, making us tremble for the 

 future. 



We more especially experience this feeling when 

 after having passed beyond the little hamlet of 

 Mass-annonziata, we see rising behind the houses of 

 Nicolosi, the double summit of Monti-Rossi. This 

 is the crater which in 1669 buried under a shower 

 of ashes all the neighbouring country, and even 

 threatened Catania with complete destruction, al- 

 though it was situated at more than twelve miles' 

 distance from it. Excavated by the violence of the 

 eruption which produced it, it has preserved the 

 form of two cones in juxta-position to one another, 

 and both rising to a height of nearly a thousand feet, 

 the dark red colour of their scorise contrasting in the 

 most striking manner with the surrounding objects. 

 A stream of gigantic scoriee issues from the base of 

 this mountain, and bending in a southerly direction, 

 falls into the sea to the southwest of Catania, being 

 more than three miles wide in several parts of its 

 course. The whole of this tract is covered with 

 an arid and bare cheire, and among the enormous 



* Cheire or schiarra, in the Sicilian patois, is the name given to 

 the surface of a lava bed, which has cooled on slightly inclined 

 slopes in such a manner as to become charged with more or less 

 considerable blocks of the same substance. 



