It was impossible to look up the mighty mountain which towered into the skies over my head, without feeling a strong desire to venture up and explore its wonders. The top, for many miles, was covered with snow, and I was told that the ascent to the summit was hardly possible. However, I determined to make the trial, and hired a couple of stout mules, which are always the best animals for climbing mountains. I obtained a guide well acquainted with the mountain, who agreed to accompany me for half a dollar a day to any place I dared to approach. We set out on the morning of the second of March. At first we found the ascent very gradual; the ground was a broken lava rock, overgrown with olive and almond trees, and prickly pears. Innumerable villages were scattered all round the lower region of the mountain, surrounded by gardens and groves. The houses appeared to be all built of lava; indeed, there is hardly any other kind of stone or building material to be seen anywhere. Every one of the villages had a church with a dome covered with glazed tiles of variegated colors, bright red, green, blue, and yellow, so as to resemble an enormous inverted bead-bag, glittering in the sun. The people were collected in crowds round the churches, firing off guns, crackers, and other fireworks, as it was a saint’s day. I could see no fences in the fields: in fact, I had not yet seen such a thing as a wooden fence since the day I left home. The fields were all divided by walls of lava. Indeed, lava serves here for stone, brick, marble, wood, and many other purposes besides. They build houses of it, wall their yards and fields, pave their streets, macadamize their roads, gravel their walks, and sand their floors with it. They grind it into soil, mix it up with mortar, manufacture it into snuff-boxes, inkstands, statuary, and more things than I have time to mention. The finer sort is exceedingly hard, and takes a fine polish. In one of the squares of Catania is a lava statue of an elephant with an obelisk on his back.