At Somma Vesuviana
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.