Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/313

Rh angles, however. In this house a whole family were crushed beneath their humble roof: they had been asleep, and, awakened by the first movement or by the noise, had tried to escape, but the broken lintel, had jammed the obdurate oaken door, just within which their bodies were found collected, beneath the mass of tiles and timber.

Auletta stood upon an elevated knoll, jutting with a S. E. direction from the E. slope of the mountain, of its own N. and S. valley, with the Tanagro sweeping past its base to the southward, and joined by a small torrent on the right bank from the Auletta valley. The bottom of the proper valley of the Tanagro here presents a broad level plateau of a mile or so across, upon which, at the river and beneath the base of the knoll, are some other houses, &c., with a poor and now half-ruined locanda, that also go by the name of Auletta. The town itself on the top, had about three thousand inhabitants, some fine large houses inhabited by official persons, and a mass of poorly built ones, all of the nobbly limestone rubble. It is mediæval, and was fortified in the middle of the sixteenth century, the castello alone now being the only visible fragment of this.

Referring to the eye-sketch (Fig. 132), the spur or elongated knoll upon which it stands has a general direction of N. 60° W. The N. E. side is extremely steep. From the highest point of the remains of the castello I found by the theodolite the general angle of the scarp to be 41° from the vertical. The opposite, or S. W. side, slopes much more gently. The N. W. junction with the mountain range, is a little depressed below the summit at the town, and undulatory. The spur consists of coarse calcareous breccia, in heavy irregular beds, with a nearly N. and S.