Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 August 1886 — An Eruption of Etna. [ARTICLE]

An Eruption of Etna.

After about three hours’ climbing we got to within a couple of miles of the crater itself. It is at the side of .(Etna, you know, not near the top, that this eruption has broken out, and we got on a bit of high ground overlooking tlie w'hole scene. It was still daylight when we got up there, so that we saw the whole thing by daylight. It was the most glorious and indescribable siglit I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly impossible to describe it, as no one can have any conception of what it is like until they see it, and also until they see it from where we did, which was on high ground, overlooking nearly the whole of it. At the top is this enormous cratur, throwing out flames and throwing up stones some hundreds of yards, with a continual roar, like any number of battles going on, and just below is another mouth from which the lava comes traveling at a tremendous pace. It divides into several streams, and follows the valleys Now, imagine from where we were that night, with our backs to Catania, what we saw. On our right this enormous flame, going hundreds of feet into the air, making the whole sky bright red, and all down past us from our right, and extending down miles to the left, streams of red-hot lava moving downward in a mass for miles, and looking like an enormous sea of red-hot coke. The width across the lava from where we were was, perhaps, three or four miles, and it started about two miles above us, and flowed some four miles or so below us, so you must imagine a sea of angry, red-hot lava, five or six miles long and three or four wide, and about thirty or forty feet deep, but all of it bright red. You can judge whether it was a sight worth seeing. I would not have missed it for worlds. The lava is not liquid, as most people suppose, but consists of many millions of large and small blocks of rocky-looking stuff rolling onward. We saw one huge rock of old lava standing in the middle of the stream of lava, which was divided by it and ran around it; the rock was about the size of, say, Quidenham Church, and this rock suddenly split in two parts; the smaller half crumbled up, and the other half was carried bodily down with the stream slowly and steadily. We watched it until we left, and it moved about three-quarters of a mile in about three-quarters of an hour. We waited there until nearly midnight, as we could not venture down until the moon got up, and then we reluctantly left this magnificent sight, which, as I tell you, no description can give you any idea of. As we went up we had all gone into a little house to see it, and thought it was unpleasantly close to the lava. Well, as we came down, this house was in flames and caught by the stream. In many places we had to take different paths, so quickly had the lava spread as it came down, and from, below it is awful (quite close to it) to see this mass, thirty or forty feet high, coming slowly toward you. We were up near the crater nearly four hours. We saw other people go up to see the lower end of the lava, stay there a few minutes, and go down again; but the way to do it is to go right high up, arriving by daylight, and then stay there to see it by night and watch the changes going on. It was glorious.