The Innocents Abroad

Chapter 30

ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

"See Naples and die." Well, I do not know that one would necessarily die

after merely seeing it, but to attempt to live there might turn out a

little differently. To see Naples as we saw it in the early dawn from

far up on the side of Vesuvius, is to see a picture of wonderful beauty.

At that distance its dingy buildings looked white--and so, rank on rank

of balconies, windows and roofs, they piled themselves up from the blue

ocean till the colossal castle of St. Elmo topped the grand white pyramid

and gave the picture symmetry, emphasis and completeness. And when its

lilies turned to roses--when it blushed under the sun's first kiss--it

was beautiful beyond all description. One might well say, then, "See

Naples and die." The frame of the picture was charming, itself. In

front, the smooth sea--a vast mosaic of many colors; the lofty islands

swimming in a dreamy haze in the distance; at our end of the city the

stately double peak of Vesuvius, and its strong black ribs and seams of

lava stretching down to the limitless level campagna--a green carpet that

enchants the eye and leads it on and on, past clusters of trees, and

isolated houses, and snowy villages, until it shreds out in a fringe of

mist and general vagueness far away. It is from the Hermitage, there on

the side of Vesuvius, that one should "see Naples and die."

But do not go within the walls and look at it in detail. That takes away

some of the romance of the thing. The people are filthy in their habits,

and this makes filthy streets and breeds disagreeable sights and smells.

There never was a community so prejudiced against the cholera as these

Neapolitans are. But they have good reason to be. The cholera generally

vanquishes a Neapolitan when it seizes him, because, you understand,

before the doctor can dig through the dirt and get at the disease the man

dies. The upper classes take a sea-bath every day, and are pretty

decent.

The streets are generally about wide enough for one wagon, and how they

do swarm with people! It is Broadway repeated in every street, in every

court, in every alley! Such masses, such throngs, such multitudes of

hurrying, bustling, struggling humanity! We never saw the like of it,

hardly even in New York, I think. There are seldom any sidewalks, and

when there are, they are not often wide enough to pass a man on without

caroming on him. So everybody walks in the street--and where the street

is wide enough, carriages are forever dashing along. Why a thousand

people are not run over and crippled every day is a mystery that no man

can solve. But if there is an eighth wonder in the world, it must be the

dwelling-houses of Naples. I honestly believe a good majority of them

are a hundred feet high! And the solid brick walls are seven feet

through. You go up nine flights of stairs before you get to the "first"

floor. No, not nine, but there or thereabouts. There is a little

bird-cage of an iron railing in front of every window clear away up, up,

up, among the eternal clouds, where the roof is, and there is always

somebody looking out of every window--people of ordinary size looking

out from the first floor, people a shade smaller from the second, people

that look a little smaller yet from the third--and from thence upward

they grow smaller and smaller by a regularly graduated diminution, till

the folks in the topmost windows seem more like birds in an uncommonly

tall martin-box than any thing else. The perspective of one of these

narrow cracks of streets, with its rows of tall houses stretching away

till they come together in the distance like railway tracks; its

clothes-lines crossing over at all altitudes and waving their bannered

raggedness over the swarms of people below; and the white-dressed women

perched in balcony railings all the way from the pavement up to the

heavens--a perspective like that is really worth going into Neapolitan

details to see.

ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

Naples, with its immediate suburbs, contains six hundred and twenty-five

thousand inhabitants, but I am satisfied it covers no more ground than an

American city of one hundred and fifty thousand. It reaches up into the

air infinitely higher than three American cities, though, and there is

where the secret of it lies. I will observe here, in passing, that the

contrasts between opulence and poverty, and magnificence and misery, are

more frequent and more striking in Naples than in Paris even. One must

go to the Bois de Boulogne to see fashionable dressing, splendid

equipages and stunning liveries, and to the Faubourg St. Antoine to see

vice, misery, hunger, rags, dirt--but in the thoroughfares of Naples

these things are all mixed together. Naked boys of nine years and the

fancy-dressed children of luxury; shreds and tatters, and brilliant

uniforms; jackass-carts and state-carriages; beggars, Princes and

Bishops, jostle each other in every street. At six o'clock every

evening, all Naples turns out to drive on the 'Riviere di Chiaja',

(whatever that may mean;) and for two hours one may stand there and see

the motliest and the worst mixed procession go by that ever eyes beheld.

Princes (there are more Princes than policemen in Naples--the city is

infested with them)--Princes who live up seven flights of stairs and

don't own any principalities, will keep a carriage and go hungry; and

clerks, mechanics, milliners and strumpets will go without their dinners

and squander the money on a hack-ride in the Chiaja; the rag-tag and

rubbish of the city stack themselves up, to the number of twenty or

thirty, on a rickety little go-cart hauled by a donkey not much bigger

than a cat, and they drive in the Chiaja; Dukes and bankers, in sumptuous

carriages and with gorgeous drivers and footmen, turn out, also, and so

the furious procession goes. For two hours rank and wealth, and

obscurity and poverty clatter along side by side in the wild procession,

and then go home serene, happy, covered with glory!

I was looking at a magnificent marble staircase in the King's palace, the

other day, which, it was said, cost five million francs, and I suppose it

did cost half a million, may be. I felt as if it must be a fine thing to

live in a country where there was such comfort and such luxury as this.

And then I stepped out musing, and almost walked over a vagabond who was

eating his dinner on the curbstone--a piece of bread and a bunch of

grapes. When I found that this mustang was clerking in a fruit

establishment (he had the establishment along with him in a basket,) at

two cents a day, and that he had no palace at home where he lived, I lost

some of my enthusiasm concerning the happiness of living in Italy.

This naturally suggests to me a thought about wages here. Lieutenants in

the army get about a dollar a day, and common soldiers a couple of cents.

I only know one clerk--he gets four dollars a month. Printers get six

dollars and a half a month, but I have heard of a foreman who gets

thirteen.

To be growing suddenly and violently rich, as this man is, naturally

makes him a bloated aristocrat. The airs he puts on are insufferable.

And, speaking of wages, reminds me of prices of merchandise. In Paris

you pay twelve dollars a dozen for Jouvin's best kid gloves; gloves of

about as good quality sell here at three or four dollars a dozen. You

pay five and six dollars apiece for fine linen shirts in Paris; here and

in Leghorn you pay two and a half. In Marseilles you pay forty dollars

for a first-class dress coat made by a good tailor, but in Leghorn you

can get a full dress suit for the same money. Here you get handsome

business suits at from ten to twenty dollars, and in Leghorn you can get

an overcoat for fifteen dollars that would cost you seventy in New York.

Fine kid boots are worth eight dollars in Marseilles and four dollars

here. Lyons velvets rank higher in America than those of Genoa. Yet the

bulk of Lyons velvets you buy in the States are made in Genoa and

imported into Lyons, where they receive the Lyons stamp and are then

exported to America. You can buy enough velvet in Genoa for twenty-five

dollars to make a five hundred dollar cloak in New York--so the ladies

tell me. Of course these things bring me back, by a natural and easy

transition, to the

ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

And thus the wonderful Blue Grotto is suggested to me. It is situated on

the Island of Capri, twenty-two miles from Naples. We chartered a little

steamer and went out there. Of course, the police boarded us and put us

through a health examination, and inquired into our politics, before they

would let us land. The airs these little insect Governments put on are

in the last degree ridiculous. They even put a policeman on board of our

boat to keep an eye on us as long as we were in the Capri dominions.

They thought we wanted to steal the grotto, I suppose. It was worth

stealing. The entrance to the cave is four feet high and four feet wide,

and is in the face of a lofty perpendicular cliff--the sea-wall. You

enter in small boats--and a tight squeeze it is, too. You can not go in

at all when the tide is up. Once within, you find yourself in an arched

cavern about one hundred and sixty feet long, one hundred and twenty

wide, and about seventy high. How deep it is no man knows. It goes down

to the bottom of the ocean. The waters of this placid subterranean lake

are the brightest, loveliest blue that can be imagined. They are as

transparent as plate glass, and their coloring would shame the richest

sky that ever bent over Italy. No tint could be more ravishing, no

lustre more superb. Throw a stone into the water, and the myriad of tiny

bubbles that are created flash out a brilliant glare like blue theatrical

fires. Dip an oar, and its blade turns to splendid frosted silver,

tinted with blue. Let a man jump in, and instantly he is cased in an

armor more gorgeous than ever kingly Crusader wore.

Then we went to Ischia, but I had already been to that island and tired

myself to death "resting" a couple of days and studying human villainy,

with the landlord of the Grande Sentinelle for a model. So we went to

Procida, and from thence to Pozzuoli, where St. Paul landed after he

sailed from Samos. I landed at precisely the same spot where St. Paul

landed, and so did Dan and the others. It was a remarkable coincidence.

St. Paul preached to these people seven days before he started to Rome.

Nero's Baths, the ruins of Baiae, the Temple of Serapis; Cumae, where the

Cumaen Sybil interpreted the oracles, the Lake Agnano, with its ancient

submerged city still visible far down in its depths--these and a hundred

other points of interest we examined with critical imbecility, but the

Grotto of the Dog claimed our chief attention, because we had heard and

read so much about it. Every body has written about the Grotto del Cane

and its poisonous vapors, from Pliny down to Smith, and every tourist has

held a dog over its floor by the legs to test the capabilities of the

place. The dog dies in a minute and a half--a chicken instantly. As a

general thing, strangers who crawl in there to sleep do not get up until

they are called. And then they don't either. The stranger that ventures

to sleep there takes a permanent contract. I longed to see this grotto.

I resolved to take a dog and hold him myself; suffocate him a little, and

time him; suffocate him some more and then finish him. We reached the

grotto at about three in the afternoon, and proceeded at once to make the

experiments. But now, an important difficulty presented itself. We had

no dog.

ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

At the Hermitage we were about fifteen or eighteen hundred feet above the

sea, and thus far a portion of the ascent had been pretty abrupt. For

the next two miles the road was a mixture--sometimes the ascent was

abrupt and sometimes it was not: but one characteristic it possessed all

the time, without failure--without modification--it was all

uncompromisingly and unspeakably infamous. It was a rough, narrow trail,

and led over an old lava flow--a black ocean which was tumbled into a

thousand fantastic shapes--a wild chaos of ruin, desolation, and

barrenness--a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of

miniature mountains rent asunder--of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and

twisted masses of blackness that mimicked branching roots, great vines,

trunks of trees, all interlaced and mingled together: and all these weird

shapes, all this turbulent panorama, all this stormy, far-stretching

waste of blackness, with its thrilling suggestiveness of life, of action,

of boiling, surging, furious motion, was petrified!--all stricken dead

and cold in the instant of its maddest rioting!--fettered, paralyzed, and

left to glower at heaven in impotent rage for evermore!

Finally we stood in a level, narrow valley (a valley that had been

created by the terrific march of some old time irruption) and on either

hand towered the two steep peaks of Vesuvius. The one we had to climb

--the one that contains the active volcano--seemed about eight hundred or

one thousand feet high, and looked almost too straight-up-and-down for

any man to climb, and certainly no mule could climb it with a man on his

back. Four of these native pirates will carry you to the top in a sedan

chair, if you wish it, but suppose they were to slip 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.

Some of the boys thrust long slips of paper down into holes and set them

on fire, and so achieved the glory of lighting their cigars by the flames

of Vesuvius, and others cooked eggs over fissures in the rocks and were

happy.

The view from the summit would have been superb but for the fact that the

sun could only pierce the mists at long intervals. Thus the glimpses we

had of the grand panorama below were only fitful and unsatisfactory.

THE DESCENT.

The descent of the mountain was a labor of only four minutes. Instead of

stalking down the rugged path we ascended, we chose one which was bedded

knee-deep in loose ashes, and ploughed our way with prodigious strides

that would almost have shamed the performance of him of the seven-league

boots.

The Vesuvius of today is a very poor affair compared to the mighty

volcano of Kilauea, in the Sandwich Islands, but I am glad I visited it.

It was well worth it.

It is said that during one of the grand eruptions of Vesuvius it

discharged massy rocks weighing many tons a thousand feet into the air,

its vast jets of smoke and steam ascended thirty miles toward the

firmament, and clouds of its ashes were wafted abroad and fell upon the

decks of ships seven hundred and fifty miles at sea! I will take the

ashes at a moderate discount, if any one will take the thirty miles of

smoke, but I do not feel able to take a commanding interest in the whole

story by myself.