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It is warm, but not oppressive, and the spot from which we view the scenery around is high, open, and commands a wide extent of country. We stand on a barren plateau. Lava-blocks are scattered about in confusion, while tall arborescent cacti rise between them like skeletons, and bunches of grass point upward here and there.
Tradition says that by the weird glare of the lightning a noiseless multitude of phantoms were seen at their strange labor far up the mountain side at dead of night flitting hither and thither and bearing great lava-blocks clasped in their nerveless fingers appearing and disappearing as the pallid lustre fell upon their forms and faded away again.
He found himself on a little plateau of volcanic cinders and lava-blocks. The spare grasses and flowers that grew between fuliginous masses of stone were already losing their bright enamel under the withering heat; a peculiar odour, acrid but stimulating to the nostrils, rose from the parched ground. Here he rested awhile.
I walked up from the town along the remains of the Via Campana, a cross-road that led from Puteoli to Capua and there joined the famous Appian Way. Along this road the apostle passed on his way to Rome; and it is still paved with the original lava-blocks upon which his feet had pressed.
We thus came at last to land; but it was a land that seemed more terrible than even the bleak expanse of ice and snow that lay behind, for nothing could be seen except a vast and drear accumulation of lava-blocks of every imaginable shape, without a trace of vegetation uninhabited, uninhabitable, and unpassable to man.
I say that upon such conditions depends the habitability of these islands, and so I believe; but there is another cause for their greater than tropical warmth: If you will glance here on the right of this map, in the midst of the mountain zone you will see represented a bay, which, winding among mountains, makes its way very close to the zone of hot lava in fact, is divided from it by little more than the ring of lava-blocks, rock-salt, and animal remains, which at this point is narrowed to a width of about two miles.
"Before a landing could be made, half the invaders, in the confusion incident to a bombardment with lava-blocks, were thrown from their boats and drowned, or knocked on the head as they swam ashore. Of the other half, a third were killed as they attempted to land, and another third within five minutes after they reached the shore.
Tradition says that by the weird glare of the lightning a noiseless multitude of phantoms were seen at their strange labor far up the mountain side at dead of night flitting hither and thither and bearing great lava-blocks clasped in their nerveless fingers appearing and disappearing as the pallid lustre fell upon their forms and faded away again.
The next circle, some four or five miles in width, represents a ring of cold lava-blocks, masses of rock-salt, and animalculine remains, from twenty-five to two hundred feet high.
There was no beach whatever nothing but a vast extent of wild fragments of fractured lava-blocks, which were evidently the result of some comparatively recent convulsion of nature, for their edges were still sharp, and the water had not worn even those which were within its grasp to anything like roundness, or to anything else than the jagged and shattered outlines which had originally belonged to them.
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