A Pile of Ashes a Mile High

A PILE of ashes is not usually very beautiful, and if it is in your back yard it is usually very ugly. But in Italy there is a pile of ashes which every one thinks beautiful, though it is nearly a mile high and though it is in the back yard of a city called Naples. It is on the beautiful Bay of Naples, and people have built their homes and hotels around the bay so as to get a view of this pile of ashes, which is called Mount Vesuvius, though it’s not really a mountain at all.

In olden days when grown-up people believed in fairy-tales they said that a lame blacksmith lived down under the ground, that he kept a huge furnace burning there to heat the iron with which he worked. His name they said was Vulcan, and the smoke and flame that came out of the ground and the ashes that piled up above the ground were from his fires. So we call these mountains of ashes, through the top of which fire and smoke pour forth, volcanoes, after Vulcan.

There are volcanoes in many places in the World, but Vesuvius is the best known of all. We now know that volcanoes are huge fiery furnaces beneath the ground, but we also know that no man nor fairy nor god is down there keeping them burning. Some volcanoes in other parts of the World have burned out, but the fires of Vesuvius have not.Vesuvius is always smoking and burning. We can see smoke or steam coming out of its top in the day and we can see the firelight come out of its top at night, but usually it does no more damage than a huge smoking chimney would. But every now and then the fires start burning fiercely and rock and ashes are shot up into the air, and pieces of rock are blown to such fine powder that they float in the air like dust. This dust may float for months in the air and for thousands of miles to other countries far off from the volcano from which it comes. Strange to say, it is this dust from volcanoes that often makes the sunsets such brilliant colors.

The fire in volcanoes is hotter than any fire we can make. We can make a fire so hot that it will melt copper and iron, but we can’t make a fire so hot that it will melt rock. A volcano fire melts rock as easily as if it were butter.