[Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley]@TWC D-Link book
Madam How and Lady Why

CHAPTER III--VOLCANOS
23/26

I did not see it happen; for I never had the good fortune of seeing a mountain burning, though I have seen many and many a one which has been burnt--extinct volcanos, as they are called.
The man who saw it--a very good friend of mine, and a very good man of science also--went last year to see an eruption on Vesuvius, not from the main crater, but from a small one which had risen up suddenly on the outside of it; and he gave me leave (when I told him that I was writing for children) to tell them what he saw.
This new cone, he said, was about 200 feet high, and perhaps 80 or 100 feet across at the top.

And as he stood below it (it was not safe to go up it) smoke rolled up from its top, "rosy pink below," from the glare of the caldron, and above "faint greenish or blueish silver of indescribable beauty, from the light of the moon." But more--By good chance, the cone began to send out, not smoke only, but brilliant burning stones.

"Each explosion," he says, "was like a vast girandole of rockets, with a noise (such as rockets would make) like the waves on a beach, or the wind blowing through shrouds.

The mountain was trembling the whole time.

So it went on for two hours and more; sometimes eight or ten explosions in a minute, and more than 1000 stones in each, some as large as two bricks end to end.


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