CHAPTER IV 

 VESUVIUS IN ERUPTION 



AT intervals of ten to twenty years the best-known 

 volcano in the world — Vesuvius, on the Bay of 

 Naples — has in the last two centuries burst into 

 eruption, and the probability of the recurrence of this 

 violent state of activity, at no distant date, render some 

 account of my own acquaintance with that great and 

 wonderful thing seasonable. We inhabitants of the West 

 of Europe have little personal experience of earthquakes, 

 and still less of volcanoes, for there is not in the British 

 Islands even an " extinct " volcanic cone to remind us of 

 the terrible forces held down beneath our feet by the crust 

 of the earth. In regions as near as the Auvergne of 

 Central France and the Eiffel, close to the junction of the 

 Moselle with the Rhine, there are complete volcanic 

 craters whose fiery origin is recognized even by the local 

 peasantry. They are, however, regarded by these 

 optimist folk as the products of ancient fires long since 

 burnt out. The natives have as little apprehension of a 

 renewed activity of their volcanoes as we have of the out- 

 burst of molten lava and devastating clouds of ashes and 

 poisonous vapour from the top of Primrose Hill. Never- 

 theless, the hot springs and gas issuing from fissures in the 

 Auvergne show that the subterranean fires are not yet closed 

 down, and may at any day burst again into violent activity. 

 Such also was the happy indifference with which from 

 time immemorial the Greek colonists and other earlier 



