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Updated: June 28, 2025
Though it treats of the tragical facts with seriousness, it is not with equal gravity that one reads that sixteen years before the Vesuvian eruption "the region had been shaken by strong sismic movements, which induced Pompei inhabitants to forsake precipitately their habitations.
A Vesuvian explosion seemed to heave in his capacious bosom, and found vent in a furious roar. Round he went like an opera-dancer on one leg, and lowered his shaggy head. The horse's chest went slap against it as might an ocean-billow against a black rock, and the rider, describing a curve with a high trajectory, came heavily down upon his eagle nose.
I know it is a cheap and feeble thought, and yet, let the reader please to consider: A workman nearly two thousand years laying upon the walls those soft lines that went to make up fauns and satyrs, nymphs and naiads, heroes and gods and goddesses; and getting weary and lying down to sleep, and dreaming of an eruption of the mountain; of the city buried under a fiery hail, and slumbering in its bed of ashes seventeen centuries; then of its being slowly exhumed, and, after another lapse of years, of some one coming to gather the shadow of that dreamer's work upon a plate of glass, that he might infinitely reproduce it and sell it to tourists at from five francs to fifty centimes a copy I say, consider such a dream, dreamed in the hot heart of the day, after certain cups of Vesuvian wine!
Well, the great eruption of 1906 is over, and the inhabitants of the Vesuvian communes are once more settling down in their ruined homes, or their damaged farms and gardens. No doubt a new Bosco-Trecase will arise on the shapeless ruins of the old site, for fear of danger seems powerless to deter the outcast population from reoccupying its old haunts. Ottajano will be rebuilt, not for the first time, and its citizens will again trust to luck—and to St Januarius—for protection from the evil fate which has repeatedly overtaken their town. The two Torres, Resina, Portici, and the villages along the shore, have this time contrived to escape the lava streams, and though their buildings have been severely shaken, and even wrecked in many instances, the people will doubtless mend the cracks in their walls and place fresh tiles on the injured roofs. They are wise in their own generation, for the Mountain is not likely to burst forth again for another quarter of a century at least after so violent a fit, salvo complicazioni, of course, as the more cautious Italians themselves say. But another outburst is inevitable; and whose turn to suffer will it be then? Will it be Portici, or either of the Torres? Who knows?—and what dweller under Vesuvius to-day cares at this moment? “Under Vesuvius,” but it is a new Vesuvius, for the tall cone which was so conspicuous a feature of the Bay of Naples has disappeared completely, and the summit of the volcano has been once more reduced to the level of Monte Somma. How many years, we wonder, will be required for the Mountain to raise for itself once more the tall pyre of ashes that it has itself demolished and flung on all sides to the winds? At any rate let us now look for a period of rest, a period of prosperity to recoup the disturbed denizens of these paesi gi
Such a fire, it afterwards appears, did actually burst forth, with explosions more or less Vesuvian, in the inner man of Herr Diogenes; as indeed how could it fail?
Here was an opportunity for active and useful service not to be lost. Dave immediately cast about to scrape up and collect such mud as came ready to hand, and with it began to build up an intercepting embankment to stop the foremost current, that was winding slowly, like Vesuvian lava, on the line of least resistance.
Meanwhile the rain of ashes and mud—formed by dust and hot water commingling—fell incessantly; 150,000 inhabitants of the Vesuvian districts fled in precipitate flight towards Naples, towards the shore, towards the hill country beyond the Sarno. It was truly a marvellous spectacle to observe the relentless stream of burning lava crushing irresistibly every opposing object in its fatal path.
Poulett Scrope, who watched the Vesuvian eruption of 1822, which lasted for nearly a month, that during the earlier stages of the outburst fragments of enormous size were thrown out of the crater, but by constant re-ejection these were gradually reduced in size, till at last only the most impalpable dust issued from the vent.
The facts disclosed by the study of the Vesuvian system of volcanoes afford the geologist a basis for many interesting conclusions. In the first place, he notes that the greater part of the cones, all those of small size, are made up of finely divided rock, which may have been more or less cemented by the processes of change which go on within it.
You want castor-oil, a very fine medicine indeed, I tasted it myself when a boy. You want magnesia. You want the patent Vesuvian night-lamp. Madam, that volcanic utensil shall be forthcoming. Do I rave, Don Bob? Has reason caught the royal trick of the century, and left her throne? Let me be calm, as becometh one suddenly swelled into ancestral proportions!
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