How great the irony of things is! Since last Thursday the fifth of April, when the cinders began to fall from Vesuvius, indeed, while they were having the races at the Campo di Marte, and Naples was gay and merry, for the last eight days our post-offices have shipped more than four thousand wooden boxes. At first all this lot of small and curious boxes, carefully sealed, some registered as samples of no valour, others as postal-parcels, seemed to greatly puzzle the postal officers. After a little the strange mystery was revealed, by opening eight or ten of them, as they were not well closed nor well sealed. These singular little boxes contained ashes from Vesuvius. More than four-thousand boxes of Vesuvian dust have gone and are still going. Irony of things!
These little boxes are sent as a strange and rare thing, to the farthest parts of the world, even to Australia, that the people from every part of the world, may see the Vesuvius ashes fallen over Naples. Till Australia! But especially to England and America: And by investigating the matter it has been seen that nearly all those who had shipped the boxes were foreigners. Which means that all the foreigners passing through here or established in Naples, or who had come here to see the eruption had immediately thought of gathering this dust, put it in little boxes, and send it to their relations, friends, lovers, and flirts. And this has been one of the most interesting points of this sad period: it has been a proof of the coldblood of these foreigners who in a conflagration like this see but the curious side of things. Four-thousand little boxes and perhaps more! And we here, feel sad and oppressed by these cinders burying us! How much better it would have been if the little boxes instead of four thousand had been forty thousand! it might have been the means of lessening this danger.
April 1906.
A WOMAN
Monday April 9
This has been one of the worst and saddest of the five days of tragic anguish of things, and men. I reached Somma Vesuviana at half past three, and the automobile which was carrying me, was obliged to stop quite outside the town closed, and over-powered as it was by the new strata of dust and lappillus. Then with the companions of this sad but dutiful excursion we have gone on on foot, sinking so deeply at every step, that fatigue seemed and was almost umbearable.—Few people peeped out of the doors of their country houses, nearly all covered and hidden under the ashes and lappillus, and spoke of two towns not very near, but not far, quite destroyed; S. Giuseppe and Ottaiano. These people told us of the dead of the many dead and wounded that were there and insisted before our incredulity. We thought that those poor peasants lied or exaggerated, we did not really believe it, but we hoped it! But alas! they were right and nothing of all that had happened there had been known, till the morning in Naples, and we ourselves, had climbed the sad calvary, only through vague presentiment of misfortune. It was quite true that more than three-hundred people lay dead between Ottaiano and S. Giuseppe. We walked dumb and trembling with deep sorrow, among stones and lappillus stopping now and then as if exhausted. An automobile had stopped in the midst of Somma Vesuviana, it had found it impossible to proceed, and was guarded by a chauffeur only. Two brave carabineers roamed sadly about, and when we asked them whose the automobile was, I was informed it belonged to the Duchess of Aosta, who having taken her leave from their Majesties about twelve o'clock, had gone up to Somma Vesuviana a little after mid-day. Not having been able to proceed towards Ottaiano either by the automobile or by carriage or horses since there were none to be had, and quite decided to reach Ottaiano, she had started on foot, on a road buried under ashes and lappillus, a road, which in ordinary times can be run over in two hours, and over which she had walked at least for four painful ones. Calm and resolute she had not hesitated a moment to undertake that difficult walk, but had gone through the whole way in a simple and silent manner reaching Ottaiano all alone on monday 9th of April, where pale with emotion she had witnessed the unburying of the first fifty dead. Then she had given all her cares and attendance to each of the bodies, with her own charitable hands with her kind and sweet words, with the tenderest encouragement to the most unfortunate.