Foreign News: The Inner Wrath

Old Vesuvius was too quiet. For days the evil mountain had brooded, had hardly puffed a breath into the sky. Then the giant belched. Up from the crater roared towering pillars of smoke and ash. Down from the crater’s lip licked tongues of molten stone.

Not in 72 years had Vesuvius erupted so violently. In Bari, 130 miles across the Italian boot, daylight darkened with dust, householders turned on lights, chickens went to roost. In the Bay of Naples, shipmasters worried lest quake and tidal wave follow the eruption. Along the road to Salerno, peasants wore metal pots on their heads to ward off falling cinders; ashes 18 inches deep blocked traffic, caved in roofs. But nowhere was the earth’s inner wrath more terrible than high on the mountain’s scarred slope.

“Guerra, Fame, Distruzione.” Sulphurous lava, 2,500° F. hot, more than 30 feet deep and 200 yards wide, rolled over the funicular that had carried many a tourist to the Valle dell’ Inferno near the crater’s edge. Glowing boulders rattled from the mainstream, set orchards and vineyards afire. The flood engulfed the village of San Sebastiano: first a stone house, then the yellow school and the little church, finally the wineshop.

Children sobbed. Women stretched their hands to heaven. Men raced against the scorching lava to salvage rows of vegetables; they shook their heads dolefully, muttered: “Guerra, fame, distruzione” (War, hunger, destruction.) Priests prayed, paraded the image of St. Gennaro, the Neapolitans’ legendary protector, who in the days of Roman persecution passed through a fiery furnace unharmed.

One night Allied military trucks chugged up the mountainside, began the evacuation of some 17,000 people. From San Sebastiano, Massi di Somma and Cercola, the homeless and their meager belongings were carted downslope to emergency shelter and food. In the lava-lit darkness, while grimy soldiers struggled to unsnarl traffic, an air raid alarm sounded. Men doused lights, but Vesuvius paid no heed.

“Effusive, Not Explosive.” One man did not leave the tortured slope. Lively, pint-sized Professor Giuseppe Imbo, director of the Vesuvian Royal Observatory and foremost authority on the volcano, clung to his tiny workshop halfway up the mountain. Through four days & nights he scarcely ate, barely slept or washed. Alone he crept to the boiling crater’s edge, closely charted the lava flow, checked his seismograph by kerosene lamp.

Frightened folk below forgot all about the professor until he jounced four miles downslope to tell Allied officials that the lava flow had slackened, evacuation could be halted. Then, anxious to get back to his instrument readings, he hurried upslope again, this time provided with a car. Behind him he left word that Vesuvius had not put on a better show since 1872, when showers of stone killed 20. (By week’s end the present eruption had caused 26 deaths.) But the little geophysicist was also sure that the show was “effusive” and not “explosive”; he had been much more impressed by the 1928 display of Sicily’s Mt. Etna.*

“Gosh, When I Tell ‘Em.” War-hardened U.S. and British correspondents seemed more impressed than Dr. Imbo. No man-made scene of battle and destruction had shaken them so verbally. They wrote: “. . . incredibly awesome. . . . The great lambent tongue on the mountainside . . . some giant blast furnace suddenly gone berserk. … A moving, burning coalyard … a torrid, gluey mass … a gigantic, grey-and-orange glowworm. … All the freight cars in the world had hauled cinders from all the steel mills ever built and dumped them. . . .” But a G.I. corporal from Indiana topped them all. Said he, as he watched Vesuvius in action: “Gosh, when I tell ’em about this in Muncie!”

*”Explosive” eruptions of Vesuvius: in 79 A.D., when Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae were buried; in 1631, when 18,000 were killed.