THE ÆTNA ERUPTION

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 10, 1879

THE ÆTNA ERUPTION.

THE Rome correspondent of the N. Y. Evening Post, gives a graphic description of the great destruction and consequent suffering caused by the recent eruption of Mt. Ætna.

This is said to be the most violent eruption of the present century. The mountain has been disturbed for five months. On the 22d of May, it threw out great quantities of dense, salt, and smoking mud. As this flowed down the mountain, the frightened people, unconscious of the fiery flood soon to follow, sought to protect their vineyards against it by building walls to control its direction.

On the afternoon of May 29, violent and repeated shocks of earthquake, loud thunder, high wind, and heavy rain, announced to the startled inhabitants the coming of the great outbreak. New craters immediately appeared. The fiery current began its fatal flow down the mountain, and clouds of smoke, ashes, and sand darkened all the country around.

The superstitious people with the priests at their head kneeled before the fiery flood, coming slowly but relentlessly down upon them at the rate of forty-five feet an hour, and with crosses and crucifixes prayed for pity and mercy. But the hissing avalanche was blind to crosses and deaf to prayers. It moved on taking their trees and vines, and houses, and cabins, and barns into its embrace, swallowing them up in its all-devouring heat.

The province of Catania, which a few weeks ago was a scene of living verdure, giving promise of a good harvest, now lies buried under a heavy weight of hard gray lava. One of the streams traveled a distance of thirteen miles from the crater, and in four days more than 230,000,000 cubic yards of lava were thrown out.

The distress of the multitudes, whose entire earthly possessions, not houses and crops alone, but land also, have been blotted from the face of the earth, is heart-rending.