smiles of nature and the charms of art,
While proud oppression in her valleys reigns,
And tyranny usurps her happy plains?
The poor inhabitant beholds in vain
The reddening orange and the swelling grain:
Joyless he sees the growing oils and wines,
And in the myrtle’s fragrant shade repines:
Starves, in the midst of nature’s bounty curst,
And in the loaded vineyard dies of thirst.’
But the Sicilians are naturally a gay, light-hearted people, like the Greeks, their forefathers; and if the cloud which now rests upon them were removed, and we have reason to think it is lifting, they would be as bright and sunny as their own skies. The women of the better classes wear the black mantilla when they venture into the streets, which they seldom do, except to attend mass or the confessional. This robe is extremely elegant, as it is worn, but it requires an adept to adjust it gracefully. It covers the whole person from head to foot; in parts drawn closely to the form, in others falling in free folds. But for its color, I should admire it much: it seems such an incongruity for a young and beautiful female to be habited in what appear to be mourning robes. I was often reminded of those wicked lines of Byron’s on the gondola:
‘For sometimes they contain a deal of fun,
Like mourning-coaches when the funeral’s done.’
But let us turn from the animate to the inanimate, and visit the famous Ætna, called by the Sicilians Mongibello. From the silence of Homer on the subject, it is supposed that in his remote age the fires of the mountain were unknown; but geologists have proof that they have a far more ancient date. The Grecian poet Pindar is the first who mentions its eruptions. He died four hundred and thirty-five years before Christ; from that time to this, at irregular intervals, it has vomited forth its destructive lavas. It is computed to be eleven thousand feet high. Its base, more than an hundred miles in circumference, is interspersed with numerous conical hills, each of which is an extinct crater, whose sides, now shaded by the vine, the fig tree, and the habitations of man, once glowed with the fiery torrent. Some of them are yet almost destitute of vegetation; mere heaps of scoriæ and ashes; but the more ancient ones are richly clad with verdure. Let the reader imagine a mountain whose base is as broad as the whole range of the Catskills, as seen from Catskill village, rising to nearly three times their height; its lower parts are of gentle ascent, but as it rises it becomes more and more steep, until it terminates in a broken summit. Imagine it divided, as the eye ascends, into three regions or belts: the first and lowest is covered with villages, gardens, vineyards, olive-groves, oranges, and fields of grain and flax, and the date-bearing palm. The second region, which commences about four thousand feet above the sea, is called the Regione Sylvosa, or woody region. Here chestnuts, hexes, and on the north pines of great size flourish. This belt reaches to the elevation of about seven thousand feet, where the Regione Scoperta, or bare region, commences. The lower part of this is intermingled lava, rocks, volcanic sands, and snow; still higher are vast fields of spotless snow, which centuries have seen unwasted, with here and there a ridgy crag of black lava, too steep for the snows to lodge upon; and toward the summit of the cone, dark patches of scoriæ and ashes, which, heated by the slumbering fires, defy the icy blasts of these upper realms of air. It will readily be supposed that, when viewed from a distance, Mount Ætna is an object to make a deep impression on the mind:
But for yon filmy smoke, that from thy crest
Continual issues like a morning mist
The sun disperses, there would be no sign
That from thy mighty breast bursts forth at times
The sulphurous storm—the avalanche of fire;
That midnight is made luminous, and day
A ghastly twilight, by thy lurid breath.
By thee tormented, Earth is tossed and riven:
The shuddering mountains reel; temples and towers
The works of man, and man himself, his hopes
His harvests, all a desolation made!
Sublime art thou, O Mount! whether beneath
The moon in silence sleeping with thy woods,
And driving snows, and golden fields of corn;
Or bleat on thy slant breast the gentle flocks,
And shepherds in the mellow glow of eve
Pipe merrily; or when thy scathéd sides
Are laved with fire, answered thine earthquake voice
By screams and clamor of affrighted men.
Sublime thou art!—a resting-place for thought,
Thought reaching far above thy bounds; from thee
To Him who bade the central fires construct
This wondrous fabric; lifted thy dread brow
To meet the sun while yet the earth is dark,
And ocean, with its ever-murmuring waves.
On the ninth of May, myself and travelling companion commenced the ascent of Mount Ætna; and as the season was not the most favorable, the snows extending farther down the sides of the mountain than in summer, we were equipped, under the direction of our guide, with coarse woollen stockings to be drawn over the pantaloons, thick-soled shoes, and woollen caps. Mounting our mules, we left Catania in the morning. The road was good and of gradual ascent until we reached Nicolosi, about fourteen miles up the mountain. We saw little that was particularly interesting on our route except that the hamlets through which we passed bore fearful evidences of the effects of earthquake. Arrived at Nicolosi, the place where travellers usually procure guides and mules for the mountain, it was our intention to rest for the remainder of the day; but Monte Rosso, an extinguished crater, being in the vicinity, my curiosity got the better of my intention to rest, and I sallied forth to examine it. The road lay through the village, which is built of the lava, and is arid and black, and many of the buildings rent and twisted. Monte Rosso was formed by the eruption of 1669, which threw out a torrent of lava that flowed thirteen miles, destroying a great part of the city of Catania in its resistless course to the sea, where it formed a rugged promontory which at this day appears as black, bare, and herbless as on the day when its fiery course was arrested by the boiling waters. And here I would remark, that the lavas of Ætna are very different from those of Vesuvius. The latter decompose in half a century, and become capable of cultivation; those of Ætna remain unchanged for centuries, as that of Monte Rosso testifies. It has now been exposed to the action of the weather nearly two hundred years, with the exception of the interstices where the dust and sand have collected, it is destitute of vegetation. Broken in cooling into masses of rough but sharp fracture, its aspect is horrid and forbidding, and it is exceedingly difficult to walk over. If two centuries have produced so little change, how many centuries must have served to form the rich soil which covers the greater part of the mountain’s sides and base!
Our purpose was to see the sun rise from the summit of Ætna; and at nine in the evening, our mules and guides being ready, we put on our Sicilian capotes, and sallied forth. We had two guides, a muleteer, and as there was no moon, a man with a lantern to light the mules in their passage over the beds of lava. For several miles the way was uninteresting, it being too dark to see any thing except the horrid lava or sand beneath the feet of the mules. At times the road was so steep that we were ordered by our guides to lean forward on the necks of the mules, to keep them and ourselves from being thrown back. At length we entered the woody region. Here the path was less rocky; and as we wound up the mountain’s side, beneath the shadows of noble trees, I could not but feel the solemn quietness of a night on Ætna, and contrast it with what has been and what will in all probability be again, the intermitting roar of the neighboring volcano, and the dreadful thunder of the earthquake. At midnight we arrived at the Casa delle Neve, or House of Snow. This is a rude building of lava, with bare walls, entirely destitute of furniture. We made a fire on the ground, took some refreshments which we had