The ascent is easy at first between walls and the vineyards which produce the celebrated Lachryma Christi.  After a half hour we reached and began to cross the lava of 1858, and the wild desolation and gloom of the mountain began to strike us.  One is here conscious of the titanic forces at work.  Sometimes it is as if a giant had ploughed the ground, and left the furrows without harrowing them to harden into black and brown stone.  We could see again how the broad stream, flowing down, squeezed and squashed like mud, had taken all fantastic shapes,—­now like gnarled tree roots; now like serpents in a coil; here the human form, or a part of it,—­a torso or a limb,—­in agony; now in other nameless convolutions and contortions, as if heaved up and twisted in fiery pain and suffering,—­for there was almost a human feeling in it; and again not unlike stone billows.  We could see how the cooling crust had been lifted and split and turned over by the hot stream underneath, which, continually oozing from the rent of the eruption, bore it down and pressed it upward.  Even so low as the point where we crossed the lava of 1858 were fissures whence came hot air.

An hour brought us to the resting-place called the Hermitage, an osteria and observatory established by the government.  Standing upon the end of a spur, it seems to be safe from the lava, whose course has always been on either side; but it must be an uncomfortable place in a shower of stones and ashes.  We rode half an hour longer on horseback, on a nearly level path, to the foot of the steep ascent, the base of the great crater.  This ride gave us completely the wide and ghastly desolation of the mountain, the ruin that the lava has wrought upon slopes that were once green with vine and olive, and busy with the hum of life.  This black, contorted desert waste is more sterile and hopeless than any mountain of stone, because the idea of relentless destruction is involved here.  This great hummocked, sloping plain, ridged and seamed, was all about us, without cheer or relaxation of grim solitude.  Before us rose, as black and bare, what the guides call the mountain, and which used to be the crater.  Up one side is worked in the lava a zigzag path, steep, but not very fatiguing, if you take it slowly.  Two thirds of the way up, I saw specks of people climbing.  Beyond it rose the cone of ashes, out of which the great cloud of sulphurous smoke rises and rolls night and day now.  On the very edge of that, on the lip of it, where the smoke rose, I also saw human shapes; and it seemed as if they stood on the brink of Tartarus and in momently imminent peril.