Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/458

 thousand. Its old citadel was not destroyed, and we saw a good many ships in its harbor. Opposite Messina is the Italian town of Riggio, which is six or seven hundred years older than the Christian era. On both sides of the Strait we could see broad streams (perfectly dry as a result of a recent drouth) coming from the mountains The captain said we should be in the most interesting part of the Strait at 1 , the lunch hour, and ordered lunch postponed half an hour. His prediction was exactly verified, and nothing could have driven the passengers from the decks at 1, there was so much to see At 4 we came to Stromboli, a volcanic island in the sea. Captain Ulrich said he would pass on the south side of the mountain, that we might better see the volcano; the distance was greater, but this change in the ship's course enabled us to get a very fine sight of Stromboli. From the south side we saw the crater, and the smoke pouring out of it in great volume. There is no lighthouse on Stromboli, as the volcano furnishes a red glare by which mariners steer their course at night. You would think people would keep away from a lonely island in the sea which smokes all the time, and is liable to erupt, and destroy everything for many miles around, but they don't. We saw two villages on Stromboli: one of them of good size. The larger one is located a considerable distance from the crater, but the other is not a thousand feet from the track of the lava as it descends to the sea. And these smoking volcanoes not only bark; they bite. Only a few miles away is Messina, where eighty thousand people were destroyed only five years ago. In the other direction is Vesuvius,