Jane here, to tell you about one of the most exciting experiences of my life: watching mountain fireworks. As I sit in damp dark Yorkshire, trying to pretend that rain and cloud are not the norm for the British summer, I think about volcanoes I’ve seen, and wish I were in Italy seeing them again.
I've loved volcanoes since I was a teenager in the 1950s, when my parents took me to visit Vesuvius. In those days it wasn’t the peaceful, safe mountain that tourists see now. There weren’t exactly fireworks, but rocks tumbled down regularly from top to bottom of the crater, and jets of steam spurted up from crevices in the rocky wall as our guide took us along the crater’s rim, carefully keeping us on “the only safe path.” It was magic, especially when he told us solemnly that the volcano was overdue to erupt, and could be very dangerous, so “if I say run, you run.” Grand stuff, even though no eruption happened that day, or any day since…yet. When I went up Vesuvius thirty years later with my husband, the mountain was apparently safe, solid, dead. (“You were here in a previous geological age,” remarked my ever-loving.) But we knew Vesuvius wasn’t really dead, just asleep for now. Once a volcano, always a volcano. The residents of ancient Pompeii found that out.
Last year we visited a volcano with real fireworks: Stromboli, on one of the Aeolian Islands off Sicily. You take a boat to the island (also named Stromboli,) in the afternoon, and pass by the base of the volcano, seeing the remains of recent lava-slides, and watching and hearing big rocks rolling down the slope and splashing into the sea. The boat docks at a small port nearby - extremely nearby, because as we look around and sip a glass of vino, the volcano towers over us, sending out puffs of smoke with occasional red flecks in it, and emitting ominous thunder-like roars. But this is just the overture to the main show.
At sunset we re-board our boat and it moors out to sea below the mountain, but at a safe distance. As the sky darkens, the show begins. Out from Stromboli’s crater erupt brilliant red streams of molten lava. They shoot into the air like fountains, then fall back to cascade downhill. There are huge shining rocks too, bright orange-red as the mountain spews them upwards, and gradually darkening to black as they cool. Some roll all the way down till we hear them splash in the sea. And the pyrotechnics are accompanied by an eerie booming, roaring sound, like thunder in an echoing valley, or like cosmic rock-blasting.
It’s an awesome, spell-binding experience. I could stay watching all night, but after a couple of hours the boat sails back to the island of Lipari where our hotel is. We and a few others who are reluctant to break the spell stand at the stern, still gazing at the continuing show till it vanishes into the dark.
I feel sad that it’s all over. But what memories it has left me!
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