Page:War's dark frame (IA warsdarkframe00camp).pdf/238

202 sprang erect. The jack rattled down. I've never seen a wheel changed so quickly. Racing drivers couldn't be more agile. At a nod from Williams we got in again. We threaded through a dead city, crowded with a noise that gave the lie to its apparent dissolution. The quality of the unnatural ride increased. It shared the incredibility of an hallucination, which, nevertheless, possesses a momentary and terrible reality.

We faced ruins that gaped back at us. At a turning the facade of a hospital had suffered rather more than anything in its vicinity. Its breached and riddled walls had an air of surprise and indignation. Farther on, a bed on the third floor of a house, whose front was gone, hung over an abyss. The bed clothes were tumbled. Pictures, awry, still clung to the walls. A bottle of wine remained upright on a shelf.

“That couldn't have happened long ago," the foreign office man said.

"Every time I come in," Williams answered, some ruin has been ruined a little more. Not a very prosperous looking town now, is it?"

I had seen Messina after the earthquake. Its disaster was scarcely comparable with this man-made one. And in Messina there had been many women weeping over ruins that were sepulchres. This was sadder, because for a long time there