There
are few lofty mountains so favorably placed as Etna for observations
of this kind. It was once resorted to by Prof. George E. Hale, in an
attempt to see the solar corona without an eclipse. Rising directly
from sea-level to an elevation of nearly eleven thousand feet, the
observer on its summit at night finds himself, as it were, lost in the
midst of the sky. But for the black flanks of the great cone on which
he stands he might fancy himself to be in a balloon. On the occasion
to which I refer the world beneath was virtually invisible in the
moonless night. The blaze of the constellations overhead was
astonishingly brilliant, yet amid all their magnificence my attention
was immediately drawn to a great tapering light that sprang from the
place on the horizon where the sun would rise later, and that seemed
to be blown out over the stars like a long, luminous veil. It was the
finest view of the Zodiacal light that I had ever enjoyed -- thrilling
in its strangeness -- but I was almost disheartened by the
indifference of my guide, to whom it was only a light and nothing
more. If he had no science, he had less poetry -- rather a remarkable
thing, I thought, for a child of his clime. The Light appeared to me
to be distinctly brighter than the visible part of the Milky Way which
included the brilliant stretches in Auriga and Perseus, and its color,
if one may speak of color in connection with such an object, seemed
richer than that of the galactic band; but I did not think of it as
yellow, although Humboldt has described it as resembling a golden
curtain drawn over the stars, and Du Chaillu in Equatorial Africa
found it of a bright yellow color.
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