This will be a hasty letter, for I am as badly off in this place as in
America--beset by visitors at all times and seasons, and forced to dine
out every day. I have found, however, an excellent man for me--an
Englishman, who has lived here many years, and is well acquainted with
_the people_, whom he doctored in the bad time of the cholera, when the
priests and everybody else fled in terror.
Under his auspices, I have got to understand the low life of Naples
(among the fishermen and idlers) almost as well as I understand the do.
do. of my own country; always excepting the language, which is very
peculiar and extremely difficult, and would require a year's constant
practice at least. It is no more like Italian than English is to Welsh.
And as they don't say half of what they mean, but make a wink or a kick
stand for a whole sentence, it's a marvel to me how they comprehend each
other. At Rome they speak beautiful Italian (I am pretty strong at that,
I believe); but they are worse here than in Genoa, which I had
previously thought impossible.
It is a fine place, but nothing like so beautiful as people make it out
to be. The famous bay is, to my thinking, as a piece of scenery,
immeasurably inferior to the Bay of Genoa, which is the most lovely
thing I have ever seen. The city, in like manner, will bear no
comparison with Genoa. But there is none in Italy that will, except
Venice. As to houses, there is no palace like the Peschiere for
architecture, situation, gardens, or rooms. It is a great triumph to me,
too, to find how cheap it is. At Rome, the English people live in dirty
little fourth, fifth, and sixth floors, with not one room as large as
your own drawing-room, and pay, commonly, seven or eight pounds a week.
I was a week in Rome on my way here, and saw the Carnival, which is
perfectly delirious, and a great scene for a description. All the
ancient part of Rome is wonderful and impressive in the extreme. Far
beyond the possibility of exaggeration as to the modern part, it might
be anywhere or anything--Paris, Nice, Boulogne, Calais, or one of a
thousand other places.
The weather is so atrocious (rain, snow, wind, darkness, hail, and cold)
that I can't get over into Sicily. But I don't care very much about it,
as I have planned out ten days of excursion into the neighbouring
country. One thing of course--the ascent of Vesuvius, Herculaneum and
Pompeii, the two cities which were covered by its melted ashes, and dug
out in the first instance accidentally, are more full of interest and
wonder than it is possible to imagine. I have heard of some ancient
tombs (quite unknown to travellers) dug in the bowels of the earth, and
extending for some miles underground. They are near a place called
Viterbo, on the way from Rome to Florence. I shall lay in a small stock
of torches, etc., and explore them when I leave Rome. I return there on
the 1st of March, and shall stay there nearly a month.
Saturday, February 22nd.--Since I left off as above, I have been away on
an excursion of three days. Yesterday evening, at four o'clock, we began
(a small party of six) the ascent of Mount Vesuvius, with six
saddle-horses, an armed soldier for a guard, and twenty-two guides. The
latter rendered necessary by the severity of the weather, which is
greater than has been known for twenty years, and has covered the
precipitous part of the mountain with deep snow, the surface of which is
glazed with one smooth sheet of ice from the top of the cone to the
bottom. By starting at that hour I intended to get the sunset about
halfway up, and night at the top, where the fire is raging. It was an
inexpressibly lovely night without a cloud; and when the day was quite
gone, the moon (within a few hours of the full) came proudly up, showing
the sea, and the Bay of Naples, and the whole country, in such majesty
as no words can express. We rode to the beginning of the snow and then
dismounted. Catherine and Georgina were put into two litters, just
chairs with poles, like those in use in England on the 5th of November;
and a fat Englishman, who was of the party, was hoisted into a third,
borne by eight men. I was accommodated with a tough stick, and we began
to plough our way up. The ascent was as steep as this line /--very
nearly perpendicular. We were all tumbling at every stop; and looking up
and seeing the people in advance tumbling over one's very head, and
looking down and seeing hundreds of feet of smooth ice below, was, I
must confess, anything but agreeable. However, I knew there was little
chance of another clear night before I leave this, and gave the word to
get up, somehow or other. So on we went, winding a little now and then,
or we should not have got on at all. By prodigious exertions we passed
the region of snow, and came into that of fire--desolate and awful, you
may well suppose. It was like working one's way through a dry waterfall,
with every mass of stone burnt and charred into enormous cinders, and
smoke and sulphur bursting out of every chink and crevice, so that it
was difficult to breathe. High before us, bursting out of a hill at the
top of the mountain, shaped like this [HW: A], the fire was pouring out,
reddening the night with flames, blackening it with smoke, and spotting
it with red-hot stones and cinders that fell down again in showers. At
every step everybody fell, now into a hot chink, now into a bed of
ashes, now over a mass of cindered iron; and the confusion in the
darkness (for the smoke obscured the moon in this part), and the
quarrelling and shouting and roaring of the guides, and the waiting
every now and then for somebody who was not to be found, and was
supposed to have stumbled into some pit or other, made such a scene of
it as I can give you no idea of. My ladies were now on foot, of course;
but we dragged them on as well as we could (they were thorough game, and
didn't make the least complaint), until we got to the foot of that
topmost hill I have drawn so beautifully. Here we all stopped; but the
head guide, an English gentleman of the name of Le Gros--who has been
here many years, and has been up the mountain a hundred times--and your
humble servant, resolved (like jackasses) to climb that hill to the
brink, and look down into the crater itself. You may form some notion of
what is going on inside it, when I tell you that it is a hundred feet
higher than it was six weeks ago. The sensation of struggling up it,
choked with the fire and smoke, and feeling at every step as if the
crust of ground between one's feet and the gulf of fire would crumble in
and swallow one up (which is the real danger), I shall remember for some
little time, I think. But we did it. We looked down into the flaming
bowels of the mountain and came back again, alight in half-a-dozen
places, and burnt from head to foot. You never saw such devils. And _I_
never saw anything so awful and terrible.
Roche had been tearing his hair like a madman, and crying that we should
all three be killed, which made the rest of the company very
comfortable, as you may suppose. But we had some wine in a basket, and
all swallowed a little of that and a great deal of sulphur before we
began to descend. The usual way, after the fiery part is past--you will
understand that to be all the flat top of the mountain, in the centre
of which, again, rises the little hill I have drawn--is to slide down
the ashes, which, slipping from under you, make a gradually increasing
ledge under your feet, and prevent your going too fast. But when we came
to this steep place last night, we found nothing there but one smooth
solid sheet of ice. The only way to get down was for the guides to make
a chain, holding by each other's hands, and beat a narrow track in it
into the snow below with their sticks. My two unfortunate ladies were
taken out of their litters again, with half-a-dozen men hanging on to
each, to prevent their falling forward; and we began to descend this
way. It was like a tremendous dream. It was impossible to stand, and the
only way to prevent oneself from going sheer down the precipice, every
time one fell, was to drive one's stick into one of the holes the guides
had made, and hold on by that. Nobody could pick one up, or stop one, or
render one the least assistance. Now, conceive my horror, when this Mr.
Le Gros I have mentioned, being on one side of Georgina and I on the
other, suddenly staggers away from the narrow path on to the smooth ice,
gives us a jerk, lets go, and plunges headforemost down the smooth ice
into the black night, five hundred feet below! Almost at the same
instant, a man far behind, carrying a light basket on his head with some
of our spare cloaks in it, misses his footing and rolls down in another
place; and after him, rolling over and over like a black bundle, goes a
boy, shrieking as nobody but an Italian can shriek, until the breath is
tumbled out of him.
The Englishman is in bed to-day, terribly bruised but without any broken
bones. He was insensible at first and a mere heap of rags; but we got
him before the fire, in a little hermitage there is halfway down, and he
so far recovered as to be able to take some supper, which was waiting
for us there. The boy was brought in with his head tied up in a bloody
cloth, about half an hour after the rest of us were assembled. And the
man who had had the basket was not found when we left the mountain at
midnight. What became of the cloaks (mine was among them) I know as
little. My ladies' clothes were so torn off their backs that they would
not have been decent, if there could have been any thought of such
things at such a time. And when we got down to the guides' house, we
found a French surgeon (one of another party who had been up before us)
lying on a bed in a stable, with God knows what horrible breakage about
him, but suffering acutely and looking like death. A pretty unusual trip
for a pleasure expedition, I think!
I am rather stiff to-day but am quite unhurt, except a slight scrape on
my right hand. My clothes are burnt to pieces. My ladies are the wonder
of Naples, and everybody is open-mouthed.
Address me as usual. All letters are forwarded. The children well and
happy. Best regards.
Ever faithfully.
[Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.]