"Signor, we are arrived," whispered the old man in my ear; and he put out
a sudden cold hand, corded like melon rind, to stay me in the stumbling
darkness.
We were on a tilted table-land of the mountain; and, looking forth and
below, the far indigo crescent of the bay, where it swept towards
Castellamare, seemed to rise up at me, as if it were a perpendicular
wall, across which the white crests of the waves flew like ghost moths.
We skirted a boulder, and came upon a field of sleek purple lava sown all
over with little lemon jets of silent smoke, which in their wan and
melancholy glow might have been the corpse lights of those innumerable
dead whose tombstone was the mountain itself.
Far away to the right the great projecting socket of the crater flickered
intermittently with a nerve of fire. It was like the glinting of the
watchful eye of some vast Crustacean, and in that harsh and stupendous
desolation seemed the final crown and expression of utter inhumanity.