It is not by its streams of fire alone that Etna ravages the valleys and plains at its base.  It sometimes also deluges them with great floods of water.  On the 2d of March, 1755, two streams of lava, issuing from the highest crater, were at once precipitated on an enormous mass of very deep snow, which then clothed the summit.  These fiery currents ran through the snow to a distance of three miles, melting it as they flowed.  The consequence was, that a tremendous torrent of water rushed down the sides of the mountain, carrying with it vast quantities of sand, volcanic cinders and blocks of lava, with which it overspread the flanks of the mountain and the plains beneath, which it devastated in its course.

The volume of water was estimated at 16,000,000 cubic feet, it forming a channel two miles broad and in some places thirty-four feet deep, and flowing at the rate of two-thirds of a mile in a minute.  All the winter’s snow on the mountain could not have yielded such a flood, and Lyell considered that it melted older layers of ice which had been preserved under a covering of volcanic dust.

ETNA IN 1819

Another great eruption took place in 1819, which presented some peculiarities.  Near the point whence the highest stream of lava issued in 1811, there were opened three large mouths, which, with loud explosions, threw up hot cinders and sand, illuminated by a strong glare from beneath.  Shortly afterwards there was opened, a little lower down, another mouth, from which a similar eruption took place; and still farther down there soon appeared a fifth, whence there flowed a torrent of lava which rapidly spread itself over the Val del Bove.  During the first forty-eight hours it flowed nearly four miles, when it received a great accession.  The three original mouths became united into one large crater, from which, as well as from the other two mouths below, there poured forth a vastly augmented torrent of lava, which rushed with great impetuosity down the same valley.

During its progress over this gentle slope, it acquired the usual crust of hardened slag.  It directed its course towards that point at which Val del Bove opens into the narrow ravine beneath it—­there being between the two a deep and almost perpendicular precipice.  Arrived at this point, the lava-torrent leaped over the precipice in a vast cascade, and with a thundering noise, arising chiefly from the crashing and breaking up of the solid crust, which was in a great measure pounded to atoms by the fall; it throwing up such vast clouds of dust as to awaken an alarm that a fresh eruption had begun at this place, which is within the wooded region.