46 
A G1RA THROUGH SICILY. 
stalwart mountaineer; may his last smell of brimstone be 
in this world, and bis last ascension be into that better one 
where there is everlasting rest for the weary ! 
From the Casa Inglesa to the highest crater occupies 
about an hour. The direct elevation is about fourteen hun¬ 
dred feet, but the winding of the path more than doubles the 
distance. 
As daylight broke clear and broad over the still earth, and 
the eastern sky gleamed with the first rays of the rising sun, 
we reached the highest peak, and turned to look down into 
the vast depths below. The whole island was wrapt in an 
impenetrable mass of sleeping clouds; covering mountain, and 
valley, and ocean as a mantle of mist, while not a shadow 
dimmed the bright sky above. It was thus upon the solitary 
cone of Etna, with the broad lucid firmament arched over 
us, and the vast sea of floating clouds outspread below, that 
there uprose before us a sublime picture of the shattered ark, 
as it rested of old amid the subsiding floods on the heights of 
Ararat, when the fountains of the deep and the windows of 
heaven were stopped and the rain from heaven was restrained. 
On the right and on the left yawned a vast crater, lined 
with banks of sulphur and ashes ; and from out the bowels 
of the earth came clouds of hot smoke, rolling upward till 
they vanished in the thin air ; and a thousand fissures around 
sent out jets of scalding steam, and smouldering fires seemed 
ready to burst forth and spread ruin and death under their 
seething floods of lava. And now, from the bed of clouds 
that rested on the deep, up rose the sun, scattering away the 
thin vapors that hung around his couch, and filling the air 
with his glorious radiance ; and the slumbering ocean of mist 
that lay upon the valleys upheaved under his piercing rays 
of heat and light, and gathered in around the mountain tops; 
and green valleys, and villages, and vineyards, and gleams 
of bright waters lay outspread in the calm of the morning, as 
it opened upon the shores and vales of Sicily. One gigantic 
shadow, the shadow of the mighty Etna, stretched across the 
lesser mountains below as far as the eye could reach ; and 
the valleys beneath it were still covered with clouds and the 
