Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857 Vol 2.djvu/189

130 At about three miles to the S.E, from Bella, were the great "Voragines," of which I had heard so much, Photogs. No. 338 and (No. 339, Coll. Roy. Soc.), which, as I expected, turned out to be landslips, produced, no doubt, by the shock as secondary effects. They lay upon the gently sloping flank of a wild mountainous region, between the Carpineto and the Costa Carlotta, called the Carlotta d'Isca di Muro. It seems all to consist of these deep slippery clays, with soft limestones coming up through here and there. The general direction of the trench-like fissures, now getting rapidly obliterated by rains, &c., was N.W. and S.E., or parallel to the strike of the slope of table land, and they had opened very variously, at different points. The largest were open, at top, 10 or 15 feet, and from 5 to 8 feet deep, the turf, &c, torn across, and the land had descended at the lower side. The movement of land, once commenced, by the jog of the earthquake, had obviously gone on for a considerable time, and might possibly be even then slowly proceeding. The greatest of the fissures, the people about said, had been traced two miles. The land that had visibly slipped, and the surface of which was wrinkled and furrowed more or less, appeared to be about 400 or 500 English acres in extent. In some places, pressure from behind, had forced portions of land completely over, so that the original surface had been buried and the subsoil had turned up and become the surface. The changes of level within short distances produced by this forcing up and fissuring were considerable, so that when a trench ran right across the length of a ruined shepherd's hut, one end of the building had got out of level to the right, and the other, the opposite