Why thirty-four years? A third of a century? Three times the sunspot interval? The previous steamblast explosion of Vesuvius before 1906 had been in 1872. In the case of Mount Pelée and Soufrière the intervals since past explosions had been fifty-one years and ninety years. But it should be pointed out that the Carib volcanoes had two years of terrifying rumblings, odors, and quakes just before 1902. Groundwater exists in large volume under all three volcanoes. Soufrière, Pelée and Vesuvius all began the steamblasts with collapsing craters, that is, with internal lava going down into the bowels of the earth. The lava usually showed in Vesuvius, whereas at Pelée and Soufrière it merely made fumaroles, or gas vents. Man, a mere microbe, could make nothing of hot sulfurous cracks. On April 25 the electric train slowly pushed us up as far as the observatory station, beyond which all was destroyed. Outside Naples the fields were covered with two inches of gray-green dust, and pines and palms were loaded with a two or three foot drift of sand. Near the observatory a heavy six-inch mantle of sand and dust buried the lava fields. The Vesuvian cone was covered with straight sand slides, whitish gray, which occasionally slipped downward. The landscape was shrouded in drifts of white ashes revealing obscurely the slaggy contortions of lava beneath. Pure white steam boiled up from the cavity in the peak, surrounded by an older rain cloud, like a hat on the volcano’s crown. My companions--Dr. Tempest Anderson and Messrs. Yeld and Brigg--were all from Yorkshire. We started the ascent of the twenty-nine degree slope in a strong west wind. The steam settled down on the summit, than alternated with clear spells. We followed the west profile of the cone straight up, noting how the funicular rails were twisted by landslides. Everything was covered with pebbles, sand, and dust, with here and there large fragments up to five feet across. We found solid footing on the radial elevations of either scoured old lava or packed fragments. The gullies were filled with deep sand.