When this matter grows old and lies
under the sun and rain it turns to good soil. The acids of water and air
and plants eat into it. Rain wears it away. Plant roots crack the rocks
open. The top layer becomes powdered and rotted and mixed with vegetable
loam and is fertile soil. So the country all around the volcano is a
rich garden. Tomatoes, melons, grapes, olives, figs, cover the land.
But Vesuvius alone has not made all this ground. She is in a nest of
volcanoes. They have all been at work like her, spouting ashes and
pumice and rocks and lava. Ten miles away is a wide stretch of country
where there are more than a dozen old craters. Twenty miles out in the
blue bay a volcano stands up out of the water. A hundred miles south
is a group of small volcanic islands. They have hot springs. One has a
volcano that spouts every five or six minutes. At night it is like a
lighthouse for sailors. One of these Islands is only two thousand years
old. The men of Pompeii saw it pushed up out of the sea during an
earthquake. A little farther south is Mt. Aetna in Sicily. It is a
greater mountain than Vesuvius and has done more work than she has done.
So all the southern part of Italy seems to be the home of volcanoes and
earthquakes.
There are many other such places scattered over the world--Iceland,
Mexico, South America, Japan, the Sandwich Islands.
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