We left our horses in a wild spot, where scorched boulders had fallen upon the lava bed; and guides and boys gathered about us like cormorants:  but, declining their offers to pull us up, we began the ascent, which took about three quarters of an hour.  We were then on the summit, which is, after all, not a summit at all, but an uneven waste, sloping away from the Cone in the center.  This sloping lava waste was full of little cracks,—­not fissures with hot lava in them, or anything of the sort,—­out of which white steam issued, not unlike the smoke from a great patch of burned timber; and the wind blew it along the ground towards us.  It was cool, for the sun was hidden by light clouds, but not cold.  The ground under foot was slightly warm.  I had expected to feel some dread, or shrinking, or at least some sense of insecurity, but I did not the slightest, then or afterwards; and I think mine is the usual experience.  I had no more sense of danger on the edge of the crater than I had in the streets of Naples.

We next addressed ourselves to the Cone, which is a loose hill of ashes and sand,—­a natural slope, I should say, of about one and a half to one, offering no foothold.  The climb is very fatiguing, because you sink in to the ankles, and slide back at every step; but it is short,—­we were up in six to eight minutes,—­though the ladies, who had been helped a little by the guides, were nearly exhausted, and sank down on the very edge of the crater, with their backs to the smoke.  What did we see?  What would you see if you looked into a steam boiler?  We stood on the ashy edge of the crater, the sharp edge sloping one way down the mountain, and the other into the bowels, whence the thick, stifling smoke rose.  We rolled stones down, and heard them rumbling for half a minute.  The diameter of the crater on the brink of which we stood was said to be an eighth of a mile; but the whole was completely filled with vapor.  The edge where we stood was quite warm.

We ate some rolls we had brought in our pockets, and some of the party tried a bottle of the wine that one of the cormorants had brought up, but found it anything but the Lachryma Christi it was named.  We looked with longing eyes down into the vapor-boiling caldron; we looked at the wide and lovely view of land and sea; we tried to realize our awful situation, munched our dry bread, and laughed at the monstrous demands of the vagabonds about us for money, and then turned and went down quicker than we came up.

We had chosen to ascend to the old crater rather than to the new one of the recent eruption on the side of the mountain, where there is nothing to be seen.  When we reached the bottom of the Cone, our guide led us to the north side, and into a region that did begin to look like business.  The wind drove all the smoke round there, and we were half stifled with sulphur fumes to begin with.  Then the whole ground was discolored red and yellow, and with many more gay