The Volcano Lover Read Online Free PDF Page A

night the cone’s halo was tinted red. Hitherto absorbed by the hunt for vases and what minor finds from the excavations he could illicitly lay his hands on, he began to climb the mountain and take notes. On his fourth climb, reaching the upper slope, he passed a six-foot hillock of sulphur that hadn’t been there the week before. On his next climb up the snow-covered mountain—it was November—the top of the hillock was emitting a blue flame. He drew closer, stood on tiptoe, then a noise like artillery fire above him—behind?—gripped his heart and he leapt backward. Some forty yards higher, at the opening of the crater, a column of black smoke had shot up, followed by an arc of stones, one of which sank near him. Yes.
    He was seeing something he had always imagined, always wanted to know.
    When an actual eruption began in March of the following year, when a cloud in the shape of a colossal umbrella pine—exactly as described in the letter of Pliny’s nephew to Tacitus—poured upward from the mountain, he was at home practicing the cello. Watching from the roof that night, he saw the smoke go flame-red. A few days later there was a thunderous explosion and a gush of red-hot rocks, and that evening at seven o’clock lava began to boil over the top, coursing toward Portici. Taking with him only valet, groom, and local guide, he left the city on horseback and remained all night on the flank of the mountain. Hissing liquid metal on which fiery cinders floated like boats cascaded past him a mere twenty yards away. He experienced himself as fearless, always an agreeable illusion. Dawn rose and he started down. A mile below he caught up with the front of the lava stream, which had pooled in a deep hollow and been stopped.
    From then on, the mountain was never free of its smoking wreath, the occasional toss of blazing scoriae, the spurt of fire, the dribble of lava. And now he knew what to do whenever he climbed the mountain. He gathered specimens of cooling lava in a leather pouch lined with lead, he bottled samples of the salts and sulphurs (deep yellow, red, orange) that he fetched from scorchingly hot crevices in the crater top. With the Cavaliere any passion sought the form of, was justified by becoming, a collection. (Soon other people were taking away pieces of the newly interesting volcano, on their one climb up; but accumulating souvenirs is not collecting.) This was pure collecting, shorn of the prospect of profit. Nothing to buy or sell here. Of the volcano he could only make a gift, to his glory and the glory of the volcano.
    Fire again appeared at the top: a much more violent display of the mountain’s energies was preparing. It grumbled, rattled, and hissed; its emissions of stones more than once obliged even this hardiest of observers to quit the summit. When a great eruption took place the following year, the first full-scale eruption since 1631, he had more booty, a collection of volcanic rocks large and varied enough to be worth presenting to the British Museum, which he shipped back at his own expense. Collecting the volcano was his disinterested passion.
    Naples had been added to the Grand Tour, and everybody who came hoped to marvel at the dead cities under the guidance of the learned British envoy. Now that the mountain had shown itself capable of being dangerous again, they wanted to have the great, terrifying experience. It had become another attraction and creator of employment for the ever needy: guides, litter bearers, porters, furnishers of victuals, grooms, and lantern carriers if the ascent was made at night—the best time to see the worst. Anything but impregnable by the standards of real mountains like the Alps, or even of Mount Etna, almost three times as high, Vesuvius offered at most an exertion, sport only for amateurs. The exterminator could be mounted by anyone. For the Cavaliere the volcano was a familiar. He did not find the ascent very strenuous