Efforts were made to remove the children and old persons in the carts, but when these had gone a few hundred feet it was found that, although there were four horses harnessed to each vehicle, they could not pull their loads through the ashes. This caused a panic among the children, who expected to be buried in the incessant fall from the volcano, and they fled in all directions in the darkness and blinding rain. Searching parties went after them, but in spite of continuous shouting and calling no trace was found of the little ones, and numbers of the children were undoubtedly smothered by the ashes and sand.
Many of the inhabitants had been buried in the ruins of their houses, and the scenes when the victims were unearthed were often piteous and terrible. The positions of the bodies showed that the victims had died while in a state of great terror, the faces being convulsed with fear. Three bodies were found in a confessional of one of the fallen churches. One body was that of an old woman who was sitting with her right arm raised as though to ward off the advancing danger. The second was that of a child about eight years old. It was found dead in a position, which would indicate that the child had fallen with a little dog close to it and had died with one arm raised across its face, to protect itself and pet from the crumbling ruins. The third body, that of a woman, was reduced to an unrecognizable mass. These three victims were reverently laid side by side while a procession of friends and relatives offered up prayers beside them.
One soldier rode his horse through the ashes reaching up to its flanks, calling out, “Who wants help?” He was rewarded by hearing a woman’s voice reply in weak tones and, springing from his horse, he floundered through the ashes to the ruined walls of a house from which the voice seemed to come. As he made his way through the soft, treacherous layer of scoriae which surrounded the destroyed habitation, and with difficulty worked his way toward the building the soldier shouted words of encouragement and, climbing over a heap of ruins and braving a toppling wall, entered the building. In the cellar he found the bodies of three children. Near them was a woman, barely alive, who by almost superhuman efforts for hours had succeeded in freeing herself from a mass of debris which had fallen upon her. The soldier picked the woman up in his arms and carried her to a place of safety. It was found that both legs were broken and that she had been badly crushed about the body.
Some extraordinary escapes from death took place. A man and his four children were rescued after having been lost in the ash-covered wilderness for fifty-six hours. They were terribly exhausted, and were reduced almost to skeletons.
Robert Underwood Johnson, one of the editors of the “Century Magazine”, who happened to be in Rome at the time of the eruption, made one of a party who ventured as near the scene of destruction as they could safely approach. From his graphic story of his experiences we copy some of the most interesting details.
AN AMERICAN OBSERVER.
“We caught a train for Torre Annunziata, three miles this side of Pompeii and two miles from the southern end of the wedge of lava which destroyed Bosco Trecase. We had a magnificent view of the eruption, eight miles away. Rising at an angle of fifty degrees, the vast mass of tumult roundness was beautifully accentuated by the full moon, shifting momentarily into new forms and drifting south in low, black clouds of ashes and cinders reaching to Capri. At Torre del Greco we ran under this terrifying pall, apparently a hundred feet above, the solidity of which was soon revealed in the moonlight. The torches of the railway guards added to the effect, but greatly relieved the sulphurous darkness.
“We reached Torre Annunziata at three in the morning. There was little suggestion of a disaster as we trudged through the sleeping town to the lava, two miles away. The brilliant moon gave us a superb view of the volcano, a gray-brown mass rising, expanding and curling in with a profile like a monstrous cyclopean face. But nothing in mythology gives a suggestion of the fascination of this awful force, presenting the sublime beauty above, but in its descent filled with the mysterious malignance of God’s underworld.
“We reached the lava at a picturesque cypress-planted cemetery on the northern boundary of Torre Annunziata. It was as if the dead had effectually cried out to arrest the crushing river of flames which pitilessly engulfed the statue of St. Anne with which the people of Bosco Reale tried to stay it, as at Catania the veil of St. Agathe is said to have stayed a similar stream from Mount Etna.
“We climbed on the lava. It was cool above but still alive with fire below. We could see dimly the extent of the destruction beyond the barrier of brown which had enclosed the streets, torn down the houses, invaded the vineyards and broken Cook’s railways. A better idea of the surroundings was obtained at dawn from the railway. We saw north what was left of Bosco Trecase—a great, square stone church and a few houses inland in a sea of dull, brown lava. North and east rose a thousand patches of blue smoke like swamp miasma. All was dull and desolate slag, with nowhere the familiar serpentine forms of the old lava streams. In terrible contrast with the volcanic evidences were strong cypresses and blooming camelias in a neighboring cemetery.