But when Doughty arrived in Naples sometime in April, it was to witness a more terrifying example of the forces of nature than he had ever seen before. The nearby Mount Vesuvius had already been rumbling ominously for several months, with occasional minor explosions of rocks and stones, and trickling rivulets of lava bubbling from its crater. It was not at first a cause for great consternation in the surrounding countryside – the last time lava streams had run down the mountainside, four years earlier, joyful local villagers had celebrated the onrush of visitors they confidently expected in their restaurants, cafés and boarding houses.
But this time was different. On the night of 26 April Professor Paride Palmieri, a scientist who had made a career out of observing Vesuvius, was settled in his observatory near the summit. Shortly after midnight he observed a small group of curious tourists passing by with an inexperienced guide on their way up the mountainside – and then, some three hours later, the summit of Vesuvius exploded. A cloud of smoke and a hail of flaming rocks and stones enveloped the unfortunate tourists, who were close to the lava torrent. Some were engulfed in it, and disappeared for ever; two dead bodies were found later, but at least eight people, and probably more, are known to have died.
Doughty, though, was even closer than Professor Palmieri, although it was another fifteen years before he was to write down his description.8
In the year 1872 I was a witness of the great eruption of Vesuvius. Standing that day from the morning alone upon the top of the mountain, that day in which the great outbreak began, I waded ankle deep in flour of sulphur upon a burning hollow soil of lava … I approached the dreadful ferment, and watched that fiery pool heaving in the sides and welling over, and swimming in the midst as a fount of metal – and marked how there was cooled at the air a film, like that floating web on hot milk, a soft drossy scum, which endured but for a moment, – in the next, with terrific blast as of a steam gun, by the furious breaking in wind of the pent vapours rising from the infernal magma beneath, this pan was shot up sheetwise in the air, where, whirling as it rose with rushing sound, the slaggy sheet parted diversely, and I saw it slung out into many greater and lesser shreds …
It is the writing of a man spellbound by both the beauty and the mechanics of what he sees – but Doughty was clearly also aware of the danger.
Upon some unhappy persons who approached there fell a spattered fiery shower of volcanic powder, which in that fearful moment burned through their clothing and, scorched to death, they lived hardly an hour after. A young man was circumvented and swallowed up in torments by the pursuing foot of lava, whose current was very soon as large as the Thames at London Bridge …
The account is an impressive tour de force – the more so as it came so long after the event. Doughty’s vivid, awestruck description, with its everyday similes and references, such as the skin on boiling milk, the shredded sheet, or the width of the river Thames, could almost have been written as he watched the eruption.
His fascination is clear: it overcomes any attempt at scientific detachment. And yet there is something disquieting about the writing – something beyond either his infectious enthusiasm or his undoubted physical courage. For all the perfunctory sympathy of his expressions, there is a gloating quality about the way he dwells on the ‘spattered fiery shower’ and its terrible effects; his attitude towards the suffering and dying tourists seems disturbingly cold, almost like a biologist focusing his microscope on the death-throes of a beetle. Not for the first time or the last, the need of the shy, retiring man to keep his distance had left his emotional responses seeming suspect, his human sympathy oddly lacking.
The eruption continued through the day, with the whole region plunged into darkness by the clouds of smoke and ashes that were hurled some four or five thousand feet into the air. By now, any gleeful anticipation of a minor tourist boom in the surrounding towns was forgotten. The prospect of further eruptions had brought panic to the local people, and on the volcano itself the scene was even more frightening. ‘It seemed completely perforated, and the lava oozed, as it were, through its whole surface. I cannot better express this phenomenon than by saying that Vesuvius sweated fire,’ wrote Professor Palmieri.9
That Doughty’s diaries, for all the detail of his later description, make no mention of the eruption might lead cynics to doubt whether he had ever been on the mountain at all. But among the collection of Doughty memorabilia at Caius College, Cambridge, is a small sealed glass phial containing a few grams of a light grey powder. A carefully written label on the side reveals the contents to be ‘Vesuvius Ashes – Ashes which fell on us in descending 28 April 1872, 3 a.m.’. If his own account is to be believed – and there is no reason why it should not be – he had spent the best part of twenty-four hours on the slopes of a volcano as it erupted beneath him.
His diary is silent, too, about the scenes of devastation which he must have witnessed over the next few days. The worst of the eruptions ended on 1 May, the day Doughty set off for Castagneto, but the lava flows had by then engulfed several settlements on the western slopes of the mountain. Fields, gardens and houses were buried under a flood of molten rock, and whole villages laid waste. If human disaster on this scale troubled or even interested him, he said nothing.
Fifty years later, as he worked on a new edition of Mansoul, the memory of the eruption was still fresh. In the poem it is Mount Etna that explodes in smoke and flame, but the experience is clearly that on the slopes of Vesuvius.
Flowed down an horrid molten-footed flood –
Inevitable creeping lava-tide,
That licketh all up, before his withering course.
Nor builded work, nor rampire cast in haste
Of thousand men’s hands might, and they were helped
Of unborn Angels, suffice to hold back
That devastating, soulless, impious march
Of molten dross … 10
As an old man, he can look back, too, on the suffering of the local people, leaping in a panic from ‘tottering bedsteads’ to watch the eruption.
Men gaze on, with cold and fainting hearts,
Folding their hands, with trembling lips, to Heaven;
Not few lament their toilful years undone –
Those fields o’erwhelmed, wherein their livelihood.
Others inquire, if this were that last fire
Divine, whose wrath, is writ, should end the world?11
A couple of years from the end of his life, he looked back in horror and awe at what he had seen; for now, though, he was silent.
As a geologist, Doughty must have found the eruption fascinating – fascinating enough to risk his life clambering up the trembling mountainside to observe it – and yet, in the record of his journey, it is completely ignored. Four months later, indeed, he inspected the nearby ruins of Pompeii, scene of an earlier and even more disastrous eruption, and then made a second expedition up the now dormant volcano. This time he climbed during the day, taking his leisure to study and make notes on the crater – ‘immense and terrific gulf, horridly rent’ – and also on the smaller vents left behind by another eruption four years earlier. ‘These have the appearance of antiquity, though of but few years,’ notes Doughty the geologist and scientific observer – and he then adds, with a calm and chilling detachment: ‘Found there a quantity of wild figs and refreshed myself with them. On foot to the Torre del Greco, and returned by railway to Pompeii.’
Clearly, Doughty’s preoccupations were not those of an ordinary traveller: his diary treats the eruption of Vesuvius with the same lack of interest as it does the political cataclysm in France. Indeed, it is hard to find anything in the countries through which he passed in these early months of his travels that truly awakened his enthusiasm.