ITALY: Act of God

. . . From the wrath of Vesuvius

O Lord, deliver us.

From the burning centre of the earth a pillar of fire roared upward, burst through the crater’s mouth, hurled itself against the satiny blackness of the sky. Huge volcanic missiles hissed through the air, making red wounds upon the face of the night. Scorching cinders curved outward in shimmering clouds and lava rushed over the volcano’s jagged edges and started downward in an implacable, destroying stream. Vesuvius, terrible father of volcanoes, had unloosed his recurring wrath once more.

For three days last week the crater, its mouth split and broken by the violence of convulsions within, spewed destruction while pious Italian peasants watched in terrified fascination, mumbling prayers that the engulfing flood would spend itself before it reached their homes. Hot ashes filled the air for miles around. A wall of steaming, writhing lava rolled fearfully along the Valley of Hell, smashing fences and houses before it, burying vineyards forever under a smoking, sluggish mass.

The tiny hamlets of Campitello. Pagani and Avino, first in the flood’s path, were wiped out. Over vineyards and through forests the lava moved toward Terzigno in two grasping, fingerlike streams. The villagers, rooted to their homes, set images and holy relics on trees and vines, to face the destroyer. In little groups they knelt, praying, with priests before them intoning the Litany, Ab ira Vesnvii, liber a nos, Domine. The flood forked in two just above the village, flowed around it on both sides, moved forward and crept together slowly toward the walls. As his home crumpled and smashed an old man, screaming curses, flung himself forward as if to stem the implacable advance. Carabineers seized him, hustled him away with other screaming protestants, who would not leave their vineyards. A woman whose father had been hurt in the 1906 eruption refused to flee because a passage in his will forbade it. Stubbornly, like angry rioters retreating from a row of bayonets, they backed through the village, the bubbling, smoking mass ever but a few yards away. Imperceptibly, it slowed down. The villagers watched fearfully. It stopped. They fell to their knees, crying thanksgiving to Heaven.

When the flow ceased Terzigno was half gone. Fifty houses were destroyed. One hundred and twenty-five acres of forest and vineyard were buried.