The villages are frequent and well built, and the hills are studded, far and near, with the villas of rich proprietors, mostly buildings of one story, with verandahs extending their whole length.  Looking up towards Etna, whose base the road encircles, the views are gloriously rich and beautiful.  On the other hand is the blue Mediterranean and the irregular outline of the shore, here and there sending forth promontories of lava, cooled by the waves into the most fantastic forms.

We had sot proceeded far before a new sign called my attention to the mountain.  Not only was there a perceptible jar or vibration in the earth, but a dull, groaning sound, like the muttering of distant thunder, began to be heard.  The smoke increased in volume, and, as we advanced further to the eastward, and much nearer to the great cone, I perceived that it consisted of two jets, issuing from different mouths.  A broad stream of very dense white smoke still flowed over the lip of the topmost crater and down the eastern side.  As its breadth did not vary, and the edges were distinctly defined, it was no doubt the sulphureous vapor rising from a river of molten lava.  Perhaps a thousand yards below, a much stronger column of mingled black and white smoke gushed up, in regular beats or pants, from a depression in the mountain side, between two small, extinct cones.  All this part of Etna was scarred with deep chasms, and in the bottoms of those nearest the opening, I could see the red gleam of fire.  The air was perfectly still, and as yet there was no cloud in the sky.

When we stopped to change horses at the town of Aci Reale, I first felt the violence of the tremor and the awful sternness of the sound.  The smoke by this time seemed to be gathering on the side towards Catania, and hung in a dark mass about half-way down the mountain.  Groups of the villagers were gathered in the streets which looked upwards to Etna, and discussing the chances of an eruption.  “Ah,” said an old peasant, “the Mountain knows how to make himself respected.  When he talks, everybody listens.”  The sound was the most awful that ever met my ears.  It was a hard, painful moan, now and then fluttering like a suppressed sob, and had, at the same time, an expression of threatening and of agony.  It did not come from Etna alone.  It had no fixed location; it pervaded all space.  It was in the air, in the depths of the sea, in the earth under my feet—­everywhere, in fact; and as it continued to increase in violence, I experienced a sensation of positive pain.  The people looked anxious and alarmed, although they said it was a good thing for all Sicily; that last year they had been in constant fear from earthquakes, and that an eruption invariably left the island quiet for several years.  It is true that, during the past year, parts of Sicily and Calabria have been visited with severe shocks, occasioning much damage to property.  A merchant of this city informed me yesterday that his whole family had slept for two months in the vaults of his warehouse, fearing that their residence might be shaken down in the night.