Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/842

820 on, and finished the work of the first. With it five thousand persons were buried under the rubbish. A little while afterward four thousand other persons were killed. Hardly had the people recovered from the terror of one shock, than others came on, causing general panic and stupor. Hardly a quarter of an hour would pass without a new shock, and the wounded who had succeeded in extricating themselves from the rubbish were buried in it again. "Death," said an eye-witness, "seemed to pursue its victims with fury. In less than an hour Scio was an utter ruin." The agitations of the ground continued, with only short interruptions, for a year. During 1879 and 1880 Scio had suffered from frequent tremors, sometimes repeated as many as ten times in a day. Mitylene and Smyrna were also similarly affected, but none of the shocks were strong enough to cause great anxiety. They were, as it were, the subterranean preparation for the catastrophe that was to burst out a few months afterward.

The disaster that desolated the Island of Ischia two years afterward excited no less of emotion. The main shock, on the 28th of July, 1883, was accompanied by a fearful rumbling, which was estimated to last about twenty seconds. There was an extremely violent upward movement that broke up the houses, followed by an undulatory pulsation. The points most disturbed were aligned along the two deep fractures of strata that traverse the island at right angles to one another, crossing nearly under Casamicciola.

Less than a month after the shocks at Ischia followed the terrific explosion of the volcanic Island of Krakatoa, near Java, with all its unparalleled accompaniments: the planting of a deep sea where had been a mountain; the prodigious masses of pumice and stones from the volcanic throat causing intense darkness for hours at long distances; the finer particles scattering in the atmosphere and disturbing its transparency and causing the red lights for months; the marine waves propagated to the ends of the ocean with the speed of the tides; the aerial waves making the circuit of the globe, according to barometrical registrations, in two opposite directions; the thirty thousand human beings that perished; and the villages and cultivated lands which it blotted out—all caused a most vivid impression in all civilized lands.

Now it is Andalusia, one of the finest parts of Europe, that is struck with disasters. The shock that was felt on the 22d of December, 1884, on the western coasts of Spain and Portugal, and as far as the Azores and Madeira, seemed to be a forerunner of the one, of incomparably greater intensity, that took place three days afterward in another part of the Iberian Peninsula. At about nine o'clock in the evening of the 25th of December, the southern part of Andalusia was so roughly shaken that fifty-six towns and villages in the provinces of Malaga and Granada were devastated in less than ten seconds; and twenty of these places were nearly entirely destroyed. Among