There was nothing "loud" about its well-bred and well-creased look.

Beautiful?
One could stand and look down upon it for a week without getting tired of it.

It had the semblance of a pleasant meadow, whose slender grasses and whose velvety mosses were frosted with a shining dust, and tinted with palest green that deepened gradually to the darkest hue of the orange leaf, and deepened yet again into gravest brown, then faded into orange, then into brightest gold, and culminated in the delicate pink of a new-blown rose.
Where portions of the meadow had sunk, and where other portions had been broken up like an ice-floe, the cavernous openings of the one, and the ragged upturned edges exposed by the other, were hung with a lace-work of soft-tinted crystals of sulphur that changed their deformities into quaint shapes and figures that were full of grace and beauty.
The walls of the ditch were brilliant with yellow banks of sulphur and with lava and pumice-stone of many colors.

No fire was visible any where, but gusts of sulphurous steam issued silently and invisibly from a thousand little cracks and fissures in the crater, and were wafted to our noses with every breeze.

But so long as we kept our nostrils buried in our handkerchiefs, there was small danger of suffocation.
Some of the boys thrust long slips of paper down into holes and set them on fire, and so achieved the glory of lighting their cigars by the flames of Vesuvius, and others cooked eggs over fissures in the rocks and were happy.
The view from the summit would have been superb but for the fact that the sun could only pierce the mists at long intervals.