“I was trying to catch the white heifer,” he said rather shamefacedly, “but she got away. It’s only a scrape along the skin—let me go, Mater.” And before she had fairly done washing off the blood and bandaging the cuts, he was out from under her hands and out of doors after Bruno.
Cautiously they all went out, and stood outside the wall, gazing about them. Everything as far as they could see was gray with ashes and cinders and stones. Here and there the woods were on [pg 15]fire. Far up toward the top of the mountain, one tall tree by itself was burning like a torch. An arched hole was broken out in the cliff above, and down through it flowed a fiery river of molten rock, like boiling honey or liquid flame, cooling as it went. Ravines were broken out, great slices of rock and earth had fallen or slid, and the river, choked by fallen trees and earth and rocks, was tearing out another channel for itself. The very face of the earth was strange and unnatural.
The walls of their own house and of most of the others in the village had been wrenched and thrown down in places by the twisting of the earth. Then the roof had given way under the pelting rocks. In the corner where Livia and her children had taken shelter, one timber, a tree trunk set deep in the ground, had held firm and kept the roof from falling. The same thing had happened in the narrow cattle shed. They went on to see how their neighbors had fared.
There was less loss of life than one might have expected, considering that the oldest man there had never seen anything like this. The people were trained to obey orders and look out for themselves. The father was the head of the family, and in any sudden emergency the people did not run about aimlessly but looked to who[pg 16]ever was there to give orders. The children had each the care of some younger child or some possession of the family. Even Felic’la, trotting along beside Marcia, held tightly in her arms her white chicken. The chicken was trying to get away, but Felic’la felt that this was no time for the family to be separated.
II
TEN FAMILIES
Whatever the strange and terrible outbreak of the Mountain of Fire could have meant, the people had no thought of abandoning the land. Within a few days they were repairing or rebuilding their huts and returning to the habits of their daily life. Centuries might pass, more than one such calamity might befall the village, but there would still be men living on the same spot where their forefathers lived, on the slopes of the Mountain of Fire.
All the same, a great change had taken place, and they felt it more as time went on. They began to see that the land that had once brought forth food for them all would not now feed them with any such abundance. They would be lucky if they could secure enough food to keep them alive. Some of the fields were burned over by the lava stream; some were ruined by the dammed-up river. Cattle and sheep had been killed or had run away. Much of the grain and [pg 18]wool and other provision for the future had been destroyed. It was a very hard winter.