The Innocents Abroad


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Finally we stood in a level, narrow valley (a valley that had been  
created by the terrific march of some old time irruption) and on either  
hand towered the two steep peaks of Vesuvius. The one we had to climb  
-
-the one that contains the active volcano--seemed about eight hundred or  
one thousand feet high, and looked almost too straight-up-and-down for  
any man to climb, and certainly no mule could climb it with a man on his  
back. Four of these native pirates will carry you to the top in a sedan  
chair, if you wish it, but suppose they were to slip and let you fall,  
--is it likely that you would ever stop rolling? Not this side of  
eternity, perhaps. We left the mules, sharpened our finger-nails, and  
began the ascent I have been writing about so long, at twenty minutes to  
six in the morning. The path led straight up a rugged sweep of loose  
chunks of pumice-stone, and for about every two steps forward we took, we  
slid back one. It was so excessively steep that we had to stop, every  
fifty or sixty steps, and rest a moment. To see our comrades, we had to  
look very nearly straight up at those above us, and very nearly straight  
down at those below. We stood on the summit at last--it had taken an  
hour and fifteen minutes to make the trip.  
What we saw there was simply a circular crater--a circular ditch, if you  
please--about two hundred feet deep, and four or five hundred feet wide,  
whose inner wall was about half a mile in circumference. In the centre  
of the great circus ring thus formed, was a torn and ragged upheaval a  
hundred feet high, all snowed over with a sulphur crust of many and many  
a brilliant and beautiful color, and the ditch inclosed this like the  
moat of a castle, or surrounded it as a little river does a little  
368  


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366 367 368 369 370

Quick Jump
1 187 374 560 747