A few lights twinkle
in the plain below. Opposite, the sky has an added blackness, an
impenetrability of shade; but what is the strange red eye of light
that hangs between earth and heaven? And, stranger still, what is
that phantasmal gleam of a lip of crags high in the air, and that
mysterious, moving, shifting light, like a pale flame, above it?
The gloomy spot is a rent in the side of Vesuvius where the
smouldering heat has burnt through the crust, and where a day or
two before I saw a viscid stream of molten liquor, with the flames
playing over it, creeping, creeping through the tunnelled ashes;
and in the light above is the lip of Vesuvius itself, with its
restless furnace at work, casting up a billowy swell of white oily
smoke, while the glare of the fiery pit lights up the underside of
the rising vapours. A ghastly manifestation, that, of sleepless and
stern forces, ever at work upon some eternal and bewildering task;
and yet so strangely made am I, that these fierce signal-fires,
seen afar, but blend with the scents of the musky alleys for me
into a thrill of unutterable wonder.
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