When I say they married, a widow may not legally marry for ten months after the death of her husband, but this couple married on credit, as they call it. There were many fugitives who found a temporary asylum in a prison in Catania and who similarly married on credit, intending to return later and contribute to the population of the new Messina.

There was a family living on the top floor of a house close to the railway station near the port in Reggio. They were not hurt, but they could not get down because the earthquake had destroyed the stairs. The man made a rope of sheets, with the help of which he carried his wife down, then he went up and fetched his children one after

another, three or four children. He went up again to fetch his money and while in his room the house fell with him, killing and burying him in the ruins. But he had saved his wife and children.

They told me of a victim, pinned down in a cellar, unable to rise; a chicken, whose coop had been broken, escaped and passed near; the victim caught the chicken, killed it, plucked it and ate it raw. They told me of others, not pinned down but imprisoned in rooms, who ate what they found in cupboards—oil, biscuits, salame, uncooked maccaroni. These victims were saved and lived to recount their sufferings. But there were others, pinned down and imprisoned, whose bodies were not extricated till they had lain for weeks and months beside their emptied cupboards, no longer on the watch for escaping chickens. I was in Catania about a year and a half after the earthquake and saw the funeral of one whose body had recently been found; it was not the last.

THE SLOPES OF ETNA

CHAPTER XVIII
LAVA

We started from Catania at three o’clock on a dull afternoon at the end of March to see one of the streams of lava that Etna was sending out during the eruption of 1910. Peppino Di Gregorio had arranged everything and provided four of his friends to make company for us and to act as guides, some of them having been before. He and I went in a one-horse carriage with two of the friends and the other two came on their bicycles. There was, first, another Peppino who had been in America, where he earned his living by making cigars. He had forgotten how it was done and, besides, it required special tools, so he could not have shown me even if he had remembered. Since his return home to Catania he has been employed by the municipio. He begged me to call him not Peppino but Joe, because he would be so English. Then there was Ninu, also employed by the municipio, a great bullock of a fellow bursting with health, whose legs were too short for him and his smile a dream of romance. The other two were Alessandro, about whom I got no information, and a grave brigadier of the Guardia Municipale.

The road took us up-hill among villas and between walls enclosing fields of volcanic soil, very fertile, and occasionally a recent eruption had buried the fertility under fresh lava, hard and black, on which nothing will grow for years.

Patrick Brydone went to Sicily in 1770, and wrote an account of his journey: A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Letters to William Beckford, Esquire, of Somerly, in Suffolk, from Patrick Brydone, F.R.S. Near

Catania he saw some lava covered with a scanty soil, incapable of producing either corn or vines; he imagined from its barrenness that