life these thoughtless, luckless people lived 2000 years ago.

And what had become of Vesuvius, the treacherous mountain? Half or more
than half of the side of the old crater had been blown away, and what was
left, which is now called the Monte Somma, stands in a half circle round
the new cone and new crater which is burning at this very day. True,
after that eruption which killed Pliny, Vesuvius fell asleep again, and
did not awake for 134 years, and then again for 269 years but it has been
growing more and more restless as the ages have passed on, and now hardly
a year passes without its sending out smoke and stones from its crater,
and streams of lava from its sides.

And now, I suppose, you will want to know what a volcano is like, and
what a cone, and a crater, and lava are?

What a volcano is like, it is easy enough to show you; for they are the
most simply and beautifully shaped of all mountains, and they are alike
all over the world, whether they be large or small. Almost every volcano
in the world, I believe, is, or has been once, of the shape which you see
in the drawing opposite; even those volcanos in the Sandwich Islands, of
which you have often heard, which are now great lakes of boiling fire
upon flat downs, without any cone to them at all. They, I believe, are
volcanos which have fallen in ages ago: just as in Java a whole burning
mountain fell in on the night of the 11th of August, in the year 1772.
Then, after a short and terrible earthquake, a bright cloud suddenly
covered the whole mountain. The people who dwelt around it tried to
escape; but before the poor souls could get away the earth sunk beneath
their feet, and the whole mountain fell in and was swallowed up with a
noise as if great cannon were being fired. Forty villages and nearly
3000 people were destroyed, and where the mountain had been was only a