Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/304

250 west direction of wave-path. A little further on, after passing a torrent that falls into the Tanagro from the south, I look up in extremely steep lateral valley—Il Vallone Petroso—in which many loose surface blocks of limestone, show themselves to have been shaken from their positions and rolled over: from the road at this point there cannot be less than 3,500 feet vertical, of calcareous beds above me. The geological evidences of violent dislocation and elevation at all sides in the mountain formation are strikingly grand.

At the 58th milestone from Naples on the military road I am close under Castelluccio, a strange, immured, and gloomy-looking mediæval town, perched on the very crest of a solid, rounded, lumpy mass of limestone, showing little or no signs of distinct bedding, and with its sides so steep, that trains of loose stones lie in huge furrows, straight up and down its flanks here and there. The Tanagro flows at the opposite side or round to the north of this hill, while its tributary from the Vallone Petroso winds round the foot of the enormous rock, (see Photog. No. 13, Part I,) to join the former to the N. E. The town and its eminence thus stand upon a sort of peninsula, rising more gradually from the main valley upon the westward, and having the longer axis of the rocky mass nearly in an E. and W. direction.

Although close enough to see the joints of the masonry in its walls, through the keen clear air, with the naked eye, I found it would require four hours' time to climb up to the town; and learning that it had sustained but very little damage, I did not attempt to lose time in the ascent, but scanned it narrowly with the telescope in a fine light. Not a single fissure was visible in the N. W. or E. sides of its external walls, which, although they look like those of a large fortified mediæval town, are in reality only the