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Casts of bodies found in 1863, were made by pouring plaster of Paris into the cavities where they had lain, and the figures of the deceased in their death-struggle are thus obtained. Bædeker devotes 25 pages to a description of the wonders and curiosities of this exhumed town. The ascent of Vesuvius required about six hours. We started at 6:30 in the morning and returned at 12:30 p.m.
In 1631 there was another dreadful eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which covered with lava most of the villages at the foot of the mountain. To add to the calamity, torrents of boiling water were, on this occasion, thrown out by the volcano, producing awful destruction.
"I will go and look into the black spots." These were the volcanoes, Etna and Vesuvius, as they are called. "I shall whiten them a little! That's necessary; that will do the grapes and lemons good."
I shall detail one of these conversations, which took place in the evening on the summit of Vesuvius, and the remembrance of which from its connection with my vision in the Colosaeum has always a peculiar interest for me. We had reached with some labour the edge of the crater and were admiring the wonderful scene around us. I shall give the conversation in the words of the persons of the drama.
When Byron stood beside the "nameless column with the buried base," commemorated in Childe Harold, he little dreamt what a rich collection of the relics of imperial times lay under his feet, as completely buried by the wrecks of ages as Pompeii and Herculaneum under the ashes and lava of Vesuvius. From fifteen to twenty feet of soil had accumulated over them.
A more astonishing, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force could hardly be achieved on the piano: could an eruption of Vesuvius be more spectacularly magnificent?
Gleamings of fire were occasionally seen over Vesuvius, but things in that direction looked misty and mysterious, though Capri loomed up, dark and grand, a few miles to leeward, and Ischia was visible, a confused but distant pile on the lee-bow. An order from Cuffe, however, set everybody in motion.
The Roman sentinel, overwhelmed where he stood by the lava of Vesuvius, defiant of disaster in his inflexible devotion to duty, is not a surer proof of the natural fact of death than the mammoth that died in Alaska before man's appearance on the earth. The law of growth is the law of death.
It is even probable, that the chance of perceiving this volcano would not be greater, if the ashy cone, at the summit of which is the mouth of the crater, were equal, as in Vesuvius, to a quarter of the total height.
But we shall never get to Vesuvius at this rate. I will not even stop to examine the macaroni manufactories on the road. The long strips of it were hung out on poles to dry in the streets, and to get a rich color from the dirt and dust, to say nothing of its contact with the filthy people who were making it. I am very fond of macaroni. At Resina we take horses for the ascent.
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