Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
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tradition, dimly throw back at us the shadow of earliest human
memory and explication?
Other gods and demi-gods are buried under Vesuvius and
Etna, according to myth. Enceladus rebelled against the gods and
is buried beneath Etna, while his brother, Mimas, was buried by
Hephaistos beneath Vesuvius. In the
Aeneid
, Virgil's story of
the origin of Rome written in the last two decades of the first
century bc, we read one of the most dramatic accounts of an
eruption in all classical literature. This is Virgil's account of Etna
in full flow:
Eruption of Mount Etna
in 1754, a 19th-century
wood-engraving.
The harbour there is spacious enough, and calm, for no
winds reach it, but close by Etna thunders and its affrighting
showers fall. Sometimes it ejects up to high heaven a cloud
of utter black, bursting forth in a tornado of pitchy smoke
with white-hot lava, and shoots tongues of flame to lick the
stars. Sometimes the mountain tears out the rocks which
are its entrails and hurls them upwards. Loud is the roar
each time the pit in its depth boils over, and condenses this
molten stone and hoists it high in the air.6
