Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/366

292 Its position and appearance are seen in Photog. No. 161. (Vide Frontispiece.) As I descended towards it, huge yawning gaps began to show themselves, upon the northern and southern slopes, where for acres in extent, everything had been levelled, all traces of streets annihilated, and where they had been immense mounds and sloping avalanches, of white and dusty stones and rubbish, filled up and encumbered the ground. Between these, shattered and bowing fragments of walls, and torn remnants of once lofty buildings, stood in mighty confusion; beams and rafters, tossed up like the arms of the despairing, stood out hard and black against the pallid heaps. The words of the Hebrew bard, referring to a still more eastern scene of earthquake energy, recurred to memory with a strange reality—"How is the city become an heap, the defenced city a ruin." Months of bombardment would not have produced the destruction, that the awful shudder of five seconds involved, when thirteen hundred houses fell together with deafening crash, and overwhelmed above two thousand of their sleeping inmates, and with clouds of suffocating dust, choked the cries of horror and anguish, that rose from the startled and often wounded survivors. In three different directions, conflagration soon added its terrors to the scene, and beamed up, a flickering and ominous light, into that dreadful night of cold and wailing, throughout the lingering hours of which, in helpless agony, they listened to the passionate entreaties for relief, the dying sobs, of relatives and friends entombed around them, and dreaded for them, more than for themselves, the recurrence of other shocks. The cold gray light of winter's dawn, obscure with smoke