A little further up the road a stair ascends the fresh and sunny hillside. It winds upwards through green grasses and grey rocks till it attains a level plateau, where a few olives grow detached and scattered. At that point I turn to look down upon the plain and the long line of cliff which holds the sea in check, so black and sheer, so strangely even in its height. It is still early on this bright mid-April morning, but the sun has force and power, and all the sea is radiantly blue. Immediately below me is a little beach, the Marina Grande, the opening of the westerly ravine, small, yet much the largest which the town possesses, and there most of the boats lie hauled up on the black sand. Another fringe of lava sand runs under the dark cliff below the great hotels. Sometimes in the early morning the traveller, waking not long after dawn, may hear a low monotone of chanting down beneath his window, and flinging it open to the clean salt wind that breathes so freshly over the grey sea dimpling into green, ere yet the sun does more than sparkle on the water, he will see far down below him the barefooted women tugging in the nets, while the fish glitter silvery on the red planking of the boat that rocks on the translucent water twenty yards from shore. [Illustration: ROOF TOP--MODERN NAPLES] Beyond these beaches the straight sheer cliff sweeps on with what looks like an unbroken wall, though in truth it is gashed by creeks and inlets, while one beach, the Marina di Cassano, has in its time done yeoman's service to the trade of all the plain. There clings to it a tale of witches too. But really, I must turn aside less readily at these beckonings of Satan. Let the witches wait. It is the lava which attracts me now. Anybody else would have noticed it long since, and turned his mind to the wonders of creation first. Most people expect to have done with volcanoes and their products when they climb up out of the Campagna Felice on to the hillsides of Castellammare. Yet we heard of lava soil at Vico; and here are the lava cliff, the lava sand, and the abounding vegetation just as lush as if Vesuvius, or some other like him, were close behind the hilltop. Was I not told that the peninsula is built of limestone, showing no trace of fire, shaped and chiselled as it stands to-day before the earth's crust broke at any spot in all Campania, or fire burst forth from any fissure? It is limestone too! What other rock could so ridge its precipices, or give so vivid a freshness to the green pastures on its slopes? Whence, then, came the lava?