and let you fall, —­is it likely that you would ever stop rolling?  Not this side of eternity, perhaps.  We left the mules, sharpened our finger-nails, and began the ascent I have been writing about so long, at twenty minutes to six in the morning.  The path led straight up a rugged sweep of loose chunks of pumice-stone, and for about every two steps forward we took, we slid back one.  It was so excessively steep that we had to stop, every fifty or sixty steps, and rest a moment.  To see our comrades, we had to look very nearly straight up at those above us, and very nearly straight down at those below.  We stood on the summit at last—­it had taken an hour and fifteen minutes to make the trip.

What we saw there was simply a circular crater—­a circular ditch, if you please—­about two hundred feet deep, and four or five hundred feet wide, whose inner wall was about half a mile in circumference.  In the centre of the great circus ring thus formed, was a torn and ragged upheaval a hundred feet high, all snowed over with a sulphur crust of many and many a brilliant and beautiful color, and the ditch inclosed this like the moat of a castle, or surrounded it as a little river does a little island, if the simile is better.  The sulphur coating of that island was gaudy in the extreme—­all mingled together in the richest confusion were red, blue, brown, black, yellow, white—­I do not know that there was a color, or shade of a color, or combination of colors, unrepresented—­and when the sun burst through the morning mists and fired this tinted magnificence, it topped imperial Vesuvius like a jeweled crown!

The crater itself—­the ditch—­was not so variegated in coloring, but yet, in its softness, richness, and unpretentious elegance, it was more charming, more fascinating to the eye.  There was nothing “loud” about its well-bred and well-creased look.  Beautiful?  One could stand and look down upon it for a week without getting tired of it.  It had the semblance of a pleasant meadow, whose slender grasses and whose velvety mosses were frosted with a shining dust, and tinted with palest green that deepened gradually to the darkest hue of the orange leaf, and deepened yet again into gravest brown, then faded into orange, then into brightest gold, and culminated in the delicate pink of a new-blown rose.  Where portions of the meadow had sunk, and where other portions had been broken up like an ice-floe, the cavernous openings of the one, and the ragged upturned edges exposed by the other, were hung with a lace-work of soft-tinted crystals of sulphur that changed their deformities into quaint shapes and figures that were full of grace and beauty.

The walls of the ditch were brilliant with yellow banks of sulphur and with lava and pumice-stone of many colors.  No fire was visible any where, but gusts of sulphurous steam issued silently and invisibly from a thousand little cracks and fissures in the crater, and were wafted to our noses with every breeze.  But so long as we kept our nostrils buried in our handkerchiefs, there was small danger of suffocation.