"Look up" I shouted, as a dark curtain of glowing embers pounced from a hidden lair. Now is the moment when every bone and muscle, every instinctual urge, screams one word; run. In that moment time seemed to slow, as a rush of adrenaline jolts my senses to pin-sharp focus. The sky is a swarm of plastic, spinning rocks, some already dulled to blurry silhouettes, others still reddened with Etna's breath. Within the moment, an instant before gravity pulls, I was exhilarated yet calm with an artifice of familiarity. Then the bombs and lapilli began falling from their zeniths. The ground where I stood lay thick with drifts of black gritty ash unblemished by impacts, I was safe here.

But as chunks of hot lava barraged a growing circle around the vent my unease grew. In all life threatening situations there is a defining moment, a turning point when danger becomes more than a word. Our first response is often words that come from a certain primitive place within, utterances that are cathartically base. These were the words I shouted as my confidence disintegrated amongst the thousands of fragments that began raining on the ground lick a braking wave. I had never been more alert in my life, but the twilight hid the ephemeral shards so that neither myself or my volcanolagist companion saw the whistling stones that thudded into the ground behind us. Held to the spot by a timeless bubble, we stared at the other's shock, each mirroring a single common thought. In the next moment the bubble burst in a unified act of self preservation. Within a dusty frenzy, packs, cameras, clothes and the heavy tripod I'd just levelled, were un-ceremonially grabbed—and flicking our sight between antagonist and sanctuary, we withdrew.

I had walked over the steep cones of the Monti Silvestri and Calcarazzi before. Then, as now, the ground had been dappled with archipelagos of alpine flora set in a sea of scoria. Only now these miniature islands were swamped in ash. In the warm summer months these weathered tones that were often set against a cornflower sky, was a pleasant brake from the Sapienza's frenetic touristy bustle. A place where people can feel close to the pulses of history underfoot. Above, Etna's cluster of summit craters vents bitter breath that issues from an impossible underworld—a realm only seen through the minds-eye, fed by a tortuous umbilical. The ground can shake here, splitting open along deep fractures that bleed to heal the mountain with a clinker scab. So from a fiery placenta comes the flesh with which Etna reinvents herself in detail and topography.

There are few places where one can stand upon the solid ground and truly know its age. Petrological moments observed in writings and maps as dendritic swaths and named cones, each impose upon the last. Etna's flanks are a chameleonic pattern of dates encrypted within cold basalt, stone that holds secrets provoking questions that may never be answered.

Etna is a volcano with a heart coursing with glowing fluids, but that heart with its surging magma is soulless stone nonetheless. I, like Ovid and Virgil, and countless others sometimes choose to personify Etna, such is the wonder of her presence—but project as I might—even within these words—Etna will always remain unmoved. I think of all the sacrificial salutations, blistered, ignited flesh within a terrible wave of screams and fire, the lives that might have been and the civilisations they would have built. Only know are we beginning to glimpse the reality of the volcano.

Through computer programs and remote-sensing satellites that give us god-like overviews through radar interferometers, while we pace the ashen slopes to level and knot the ends of virtual lines with dry-tilt terminology. We can never see a dilating vessel with our own eyes, but by extension, by proxy we have developed the know-how to sense this and more. History has never been written to the swing of a constant metronome, it is as erratic as the fitful trace of a seismometer. We push the boundaries of possibilities, of the can do's, and with each step—add to a growing flood of data. At least with a lava flow you can see what's coming, although even here it is modern technology that writes the overture.

For as long as I can remember I have viewed both art and science, as intrinsic parts of a common whole. I have surrendered myself with books in the hope that one day I too will understand the abstract languages that defines the invisible. However, for me the inference of this knowledge needs to be set in the real world, it has to transcend the theoretical and by doing so become an audible finger that points to the volcano exclaiming 'This is how! Only then will this knowledge be understood and relevant on a human scale.

The vent exploded again, only this time the ridge where we had stood was inundated with a mass of bombs so dense—that little of our body's would have been recognisable, had we been found at all. This second blast was so powerful that we withdrew again, as low pressure waves buffeted our skin with growing domes of sound that fought against an ash laden wind. Night had taken hold of the sky, but the air had been claimed by the volcano. It wove a refulgent cloth with warp-threads of lava and weft of glassy dust that stifled. Every stinging blink and shake of gritty hair, each sweaty wipe of brow, became a conscious act. Etna had etched and abraded her claim to me, blacking my face to mirror her own.

In our limited wisdom, the human animal lays claim to territories and artefacts and others, claims seeded out of immature superegos, force and fear. Yet, no matter how we strive to distance ourselves from the confluence of these shared roots, the fearful religious rationalisations, the dogma of superiority, despite all of this, the weight of epochs holds us fast. Whole continents have been annexed and raped, cultures overthrown and societies assimilated or annihilated. We have placed icons of our achievements on other worlds and left footprints on dust-covered floods of moon-bound basalt. Sulphur spews from Io as decoded dots on remote-controlled screens, and seeing it we feel remote from things beyond us. At night our dreams consumed us, but we can also dream of hidden worlds within; and how little we know of them. Appeasement and coincidence have danced hand in hand to convince us of our influence—but the volcano is no god, it is heat and rock and gas, it is unthinking, yet it rules us nonetheless. Throughout history people have struggled to define and understand Etna, a fiery prop that has oft been used upon the stage of heaven and hell. If only we could follow in the antic footsteps of Raspe's eponymous Baron, what might we learn then?

Today, agriculture, science and tourism all form parts of the Etna's modern, marketable image, Etna the consumer has become consumable through a welter of gaudy, postcard tack; shelves stacked with scarlet Lava Liqueur and glittered-lava-ashtrays, key-rings and colour-keyed maps, T-shirts, videos, sickly-sweet honey, preserves and pens. Mementoes, epitaphs of a single day, they sit amongst a thousand others, gathering dust.

As a child I had been given a small piece of clear quartz shot with golden needles of rutile, inclusions that shimmered with the latent sun of latent years, like nothing I had seen before or since. When I held it I felt a pure magic that seeded dreams of coastal caverns lined with every crystal treasure, of exotic fossils heaped with gems and native elements. I have it still, hidden amongst a crowd of geological relics, that are the keepsakes of obsession. Each has a story of its own, a history that will never become certain knowledge no matter how we split the stone. Only on a volcano do we see that story unfold before our eyes. I've held rocks still hot from placental paroxysm, and felt as though I had touched the very face of creation.

With its spinning profile, the tonality of a high, hurtling bomb cut through the air with the whipping sound of a nearing boomerang. There's little time to think and less room to manoeuvre, perched on the lip of the Monti Silvestri Superiore, but it is the most spectacular place, where sights and sounds unite. The sky is black and pricked with stars and planets, but the darkness here is a very temporal thing, as bubbles of exsolved gas tear at newly surfaced magma, ripping it into a million glassy shards. This expelled rock is the stuff of cones, the stuff of the Silvestri, malleable, infinitely shaped—and governed by the same force that pulled the Earth together. In a second the unnerving noise ends with a dull thud that is lost within the constant dissonance beyond. The rim is a loose compromise between sight and safety and we are not alone here. Drawn to the volcano others sit or stand as black profiles, barely stirring on the metre wide path that parts the crater from the flank. These are the few who by hook or by crook or by just plain doggedness, had made it here past two roadblocks, an ash-bound airport—that closed just as my plane was about to land—and a sapping sun that made the daytime air laced with head-spinning gases and grit, even more uncomfortable than it already was. All week I had felt ill from this noxious mix and as the lava, flowed from the bottom-most vent, so the world flowed from my bottom to the underworld of Nicolosi's sewers—thank God for Imodium.

The wind combed the steam as it parted from the melt, teasing the lit fumes to a ghostly evanescent orange. This almost calming drifting front was being shot every second by endless volley of poetic, glowing showers; blasts from the other boccas that struck and bounced and scurried down the cone like luminous scribble. It was visual intoxication that I could never get enough of—but all good things.

Above Nicolosi, the flow-front had slowed to a snails pace, crippled by its own viscous bulk lumbering through a gentle slope of old lichen and brush-covered lava. A steaming charcoal swath by day, this flow became a twisting chameleon at night—with veins of crimson, sketched by lit boulders pealing from the flow's, ablative façade. Bound in parts by shear levees, these glowing lines led the eye up to the Silvestri and beyond. In the sultry heat of a Sicilian summer night, Etna was ablaze. Pumped by magmas from hidden realms—some deep, some not—the volcano had split apart in a symphony of earth shaking fits, and from these rifts, I watched, as Etna redrew herself with a luminous pen. The spitting vents and dorsum flow that skirting the Silvestri, was only part of this new face, but dramatic as it was, above, Etna had unleashed a Titan. The Monti Laghetto, like a rite to Goethe's volcanist; Anaxagoras, had burst Through the composed ground at the heart of the Piano Del Lago. Standing more than two hundred metres above a new, shouldered rift the furious sibling vent, was only a week old, but it had already changed a tract of Etna's back that I had come to know well. One time I passed cheerless night on the Piano, curled in a shallow scrap, dug from young scoria. It had been a fitful time, where cold sleepless hours were stretched by the unease of seeing the fall of scoria three days before. This "charr'd, blacken'd, melancholy waste," had been erupted over the southern flanks by a paroxysmal lava fountain, one of the millennia's many. Another was expected any time, but in the end it was a fearless, cold wind that shivered through my saturnine frame. Had I known of the latent weakness that capped Typhus, I may have taken to my bed in Nicolosi—but Etna is punctuated by breaches, far below its eyeshot vertex. Clefts healed by names; Nero, Gemmellaro, Grosso, Guardiola, Nocilla, Fusaro and Monti Rossi—who's pine-clad twins press against Nicolosi as a Damocles of sleeping hap. Life on Etna is tentative and blind to elevation of place as she is blind to social place, but no matter what, it is a rich life, that I ache to soak.

Etna had become a transient party, a place of reverence and revelry, sounds and fireworks, drinks and families hand in hand, silhouetted against dusty headlights and flashing blue. Held within a ring of surreal-set blockades Etna seduce and taunts—with press-pass codes and permit familiarity, checked by mutable eyes and torchlight. Gritty footsteps and inquisitive, smoking laughs drift with the ash from fashionable figures, with sculpted hair pinned by designer-shades. All overseen by the fire and the silent gas. Hot returning adventurers, stumble, ill defined and ill prepared for their triumphant quest to go a little closer to the distant action. And I, with a single steep followed, traversed the centuries with an unsteady move and doing so blooded my hand on phenocrysts and shadows. Sound and light moved disparagingly above La Montagnola, reminding me of Virgil's vision of "rocks torn from the very entrails of the mountain and seething molten rock surges, roaring, from its lowest depths high into the air". Many have pondered poetically on the imprisonment of Enceladus, but myth and legend lay intrinsic to Etna's stratification of social and buried life. A goat-herder's dry-stone hut reconstituted, consumed before farms and tracks, heavily worn paths and villages. Souls put to flight by the moving earth, a 'lava di gente' turned away, yet facade in Sant' Agata's veil they pray, and praying hope to turn the flood. Fragment. Pell-mell that somehow Etna gives connected meaning to. Fixed by ink, names on a map are nothing without eyes to read and mind to name them anew. But what of these names? The goat-herder, the farmer, the villagers, what of their purpose? In chinks, time has been torn apart by cracked hands, quarrymen who brakes the flows, for walls and roads and concrete—but not today. Now they work day and night, driven by a media stoked battle, ripping old lava to steer the new.

Within this lurid stage, I lay on the soft, falling veneer to photograph one of these young pristine knights clad in camouflage-grey, brandishing a sharp, silver phone. The ground that held me, vibrated like knocking pipes, as if to shake words of impermanent praise from my lips. I became the quarry of a news-team who moved—to watch me watch, and asked to tag-along to tag my day. But I had friends to see—to offer what little help I could—as the lava I had watched upon the Silvestri point, from this side—had nearly ridden, unmoved, over their livelihood.

Inside, the building had been gutted of most things that were movable, when a renegade lobe breached the heaped embankment, but the Esagonal had stood defiant, saved by hydraulics, black rubber, water-jets and caged wheels. I walked from the dry rain into a dimmer light to find, with widening pupils, the ill defined, red-fleeced figure I had come to know with warmth. An understanding hug—not too familiar, nor too consoling—then shared words and a smiling solid hand. Then came their offer of food.

(To be Continued)

© 2002Jeremy Bishop. All rights reserved.
E-mail:Jeremybishop@onetel.net Tel: +44 (0)7968 950616