Night ascent of a volcano

Text 1: At the Lip of the Crater, by Edmund Varley

An original travel writing written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

We began the ascent at nine o’clock at night, upon mules, with a guide named Gennaro who sang the whole way in a voice like a cart in need of grease and could not be induced to stop. The road wound up through vineyards silver under the moon, and then through orchards, and then through nothing at all: a black and broken waste of old lava, twisted into ropes and knots and frozen waves, as though some vast cauldron had boiled over and been left to cool.

Above us, all the while, the mountain glowed. Not steadily, as a fire glows, but in pulses, as a heart beats. Every few minutes a dull red light swelled at the summit, lit the underside of its own cloud of smoke, and died away; and a moment later came the sound, a deep and distant cough that I felt in my chest rather than heard.

At the foot of the cone we left the mules and went on foot, and here the climbing began in earnest. The slope was of loose ash, as steep as a roof, and for every three steps I took I slid back two. My lungs burned with sulphur. My boots grew so hot that I could feel the ground through the soles. Twice Gennaro seized me by the collar and hauled me up like a sack of meal, still singing.

And then we were at the lip, and I looked down, and forgot everything. Below us, perhaps two hundred feet, lay a lake of fire: not flame, but liquid, a slow crimson flood crusted with black, splitting and healing and splitting again, so that it seemed alive and breathing in its sleep. As I watched, it heaved, and a fountain of molten rock leapt up into the darkness, hung there, red and gold and beautiful beyond any words I possess, and fell back with a sound like surf upon a beach.

Gennaro, for the first time that night, was silent. Then he crossed himself, lit a cigar from a glowing crack at his feet, and suggested that we go down.

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