Part of the way we skirted the hobs of the great witches’ caldron of Vesuvius.  On this day the resident demons must have been stirring their brew with special enthusiasm, for the smoky smudge which always wreathes its lips had increased to a great billowy plume that lay along the naked flanges of the devil mountain for miles and miles.  Now we would go puffing and panting through some small outlying environ of the city.  Always the principal products of such a village seemed to be young babies and macaroni drying in the sun.  I am still reasonably fond of babies, but I date my loss of appetite for imported macaroni from that hour.  Now we would emerge on a rocky headland and below us would be the sea, eternally young and dimpling like a maiden’s cheek; but the crags above were eternally old and all gashed with wrinkles and seamed with folds, like the jowls of an ancient squaw.  Then for a distance we would run right along the face of the cliff.  Directly beneath us we could see little stone huts of fishermen clinging to the rocks just above high-water mark, like so many gray limpets; and then, looking up, we would catch a glimpse of the vineyards, tucked into man-made terraces along the upper cliffs, like bundled herbs on the pantry shelves of a thrifty housewife; and still higher up there would be orange groves and lemon groves and dusty-gray olive groves.  Each succeeding picture was Byzantine in its coloring.  Always the sea was molten blue enamel, and the far-away villages seemed crafty inlays of mosaic work; and the sun was a disk of hammered Grecian gold.

A man from San Francisco was sharing the car with us, and he came right out and said that if he were sure heaven would be as beautiful as the Bay of Naples, he would change all his plans and arrange to go there.  He said he might decide to go there anyhow, because heaven was a place he had always heard very highly spoken of.  And I agreed with him.

The sun was slipping down the western sky and was laced with red like a bloodshot eye, with a Jacob’s Ladder of rainbow shafts streaming down from it to the water, when we turned inland; and after several small minor stops, while the automobile caught its breath and had the heaves and the asthma, we came to Pompeii over a road built of volcanic rock.  I have always been glad that we went there on a day when visitors were few.  The very solitude of the place aided the mind in the task of repeopling the empty streets of that dead city by the sea with the life that was hers nearly two thousand years ago.  Herculaneum will always be buried, so the scientists say, for Herculaneum was snuggled close up under Vesuvius, and the hissing-hot lava came down in waves; and first it slugged the doomed town to death and then slagged it over with impenetrable, flint-hard deposits.  Pompeii, though, lay farther away, and was entombed in dust and ashes only; so that it has been comparatively easy to unearth it and make it whole again.  Even so, after one hundred and sixty-odd years of more or less desultory explorations, nearly a third of its supposed area is yet to be excavated.