234 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE, 
A VIEW OF ATNA. 
BY S. P. LANGLEY. 
It was now December, but in spite of my haste to get on the mountain before 
the snows covered it, I stopped at Taormina, half-way to Catania (whence the 
ascent was to be made), to view A‘tna from the north. ‘Taormina is built on the 
southern slope of a spur projecting into the Mediterranean, whose northern ridge, 
rising a thousand feet above the sea, is crowned by the ruins of a Grecian theatre. 
The stream of pleasure-travel seems to pass by this wonderful coast, so that com- 
paratively few tourists see the shores of Sicily, except from the steamer which takes 
them to Athens or Alexandria; but if the reader is among those few, he may re- 
member the view from these ruins at sunrise as one of which the earth cannot 
furnish many. He will remember, perhaps, rising long before daybreak for a 
solitary climb through steep lanes, half seeing, half groping, his way between high 
walls, over which started into dim sight spectral figures with outstretched arms, 
resolved, as he drew nearer, into some overleaning cactus, vaguely outlined over- 
head against the starry sky. Mounting higher, one comes out from between the 
overshadowing walls into the moonlight, the waning moon, a crescent in the east, 
‘* holding the old moon in her arms,” while, when higher yet, the columns of the 
ancient proscenium stand out against a faint glow that shows where the sun is 
yet to rise; till, passing by these, climbing and groping up the stone benches 
which once held tiers of spectators, one takes a solitary seat at the summit. _Be- 
low, the last lights are still twinkling on the coast, but beyond and over the 
columns, all along the south, rises a dark something, which might be a hundred 
yards away, but is A‘tna, and twenty miles distant. As the dawn grows brighter 
the outlook extends north and east to Italy, and as the sun makes ready to come 
out of the ocean the gray mass in the south moves further away, and takes on dis- 
tinctness as it recedes, until we make out the whole form of A‘tna, with the out- 
line of the crater and of the snow fields about its summit. These distant snows 
suddenly changed their gray to a rose pink as they caught the light of the sun be- 
fore it had risen to me; but of all that was seen when it came out of the ocean I 
was most concerned with the mountain itself, which can be viewed better here, as 
a whole, than from any nearer point. 
The coast line on the lett preserves the level to the eye, but except for this, so 
wide is the base of A‘tna that it fills the whole southern landscape, which seems 
to be tilted upward till its horizon ends in the sky. I could see from here how 
almost incomparably larger the immense volcano appears than Vesuvius; and the 
actual difference is in fact enormous, the height of ‘tna being (if we disregard the 
terminal cone of each) nearly three times, and its mass probably twenty times, 
that of its Italian neighbor. The entire mountain in all its substance is lava, 
which has built itself up in eruptions; but from this point the successive zones of 
vegetation are visible which in the course of ages have in part occupied its sur- 
