We leave our automobile. Two other large empty ones watched by a
chauffeur, are here. One belongs to the duke of Aosta, who has come
here this afternoon with count d'Aglié and lieutenant Gaston Pagliano
proceeding with them on horseback or on foot to Ottaiano or S. Giuseppe
di Ottaiano, knee deep through ashes, stones, and lava. The other
automobile belongs to the duchess or Aosta. This brave and courageous
woman has reached this place a little later, and has gone to Ottaiano
on foot, not caring for the enormous difficulties and fatigue she
would encounter. While we are trying to imitate her, here is all the
population of pretty Somma Vesuviana around us: men, women, children,
crowding, and putting to us a thousand questions, while we, answering,
address just as many to them. Digging up the earth they show us the
three stratus forming the mound that has covered their little homes
and fields. Three stratus, a reddish one, a blackish one, and one of
stones, alas! just like Pompei. Women with babies in their arms speak
slow and low, and mournfully complain of their fate. They have, had, as
they say, three nights of hell: the first all lightning and flashes,
when their terror has been terrible, though they thought they were
protected by the great mountain of Somma, and no lava would run down on
their side. The second a night full of fright and ruination, and the
third, the one between Saturday and Sunday, when the terrible rain of
ashes, lapillus, and stones, began.
They have fled terrified through their farthest fields, way down as
possible. The most courageous have past the night in the open air, with
their children around them, trembling with fear praying, and weeping.
Next day they have been wandering around their houses, trying to free
them from the weight of the cinders and stones, helping each other,
simply resigned and abandoned to their fate, trying all the means to
conquer it. The third night, the last one, they have all slept with
their poor little ones, clasped in their arms, on the straw, in the
fields, not daring to go back into the houses.
Men and women are now looking at their buried fields, their destroyed
harvest, the heavy cinders, the heavy rocks. They look at the work of
this night which throws them in the most abject poverty and starvation,
they look over it all with eyes of calm despair, and it seem to me a
shame for the human heart that they hope nothing, and ask nothing from
the men of Naples, their brothers in God, their brothers in Jesus. They
ask nothing, because they know of obtaining nothing.
At Somma Vesuviana one man has died in Margarita street. An old man by
the name of Raffaele, known as Tuppete, He died in his bed, crushed
under the fall of his roof. Twenty or thirty houses have tumbled down
at Somma Vesuviana, one church is in great danger, the walls of another
are cracked. Men bend their heads and are silent, others sadly admit
that their misery is nothing compared to the destruction of Ottaiano
where more than one hundred and fifty people have died. Has Ottaiano
then been destroyed only by the fall of lapillus and stones? Surely
the lava cannot run on it, as the town is placed on the opposite side
of the eruption.--Have really so many people perished under this heavy
and fiery rain, while not one has perished under the lava? Is it Pompei
again? Let us go there then, if it is true.