cessor for protection and pleader for divine favours in this world and the next.

Another attracted my attention, and she also a woman. She sat motionless and speechless on a seat. Her eyes, staring and expressionless like the unclosed eyes of a corpse, were fixed on the face of the saint. Intense fear had removed any visible sense of alarm and almost all signs of life.

Fear, in fact, reigned supreme on all sides, and increased as the greatness of the disaster became known. It manifested itself in different ways according to the individual. It generally took some form of egoism. One man was moved to tears at the sight of the universal destruction at Messina. Yet his chief lamentation was a complaint that God had deprived the land of that peace and wellbeing in which he himself had so greatly delighted. Another, and he a public functionary, refused to attend to his duties because some remote property of his had been slightly injured. So complete was the demoralisation no work was done for a week after the earthquake, although no damage had been caused in the town itself. The great violence of the shock of earthquake alone had produced the panic.

Groups of idlers, talking in subdued tones, paraded the streets. They had been there all day. They would be there all night. Few would risk sleeping under a roof. Tales of warning and premonition of the disaster were many. Predictions of wise women were recalled. Dreams were related below the breath. The death-fires had danced at night'-the ignis fatuus had been seen the evening before. It had floated over the sea, where it hovered in a long serpent-like form of glowing vapour, weird and unearthly. It had risen to the hills until near the little cemetery of the town where, lingering a short time, it disappeared, to be seen no more.'

Towards evening vague rumours concerning the fate of Messina were in circulation. Nobody could tell from what source they came. The idea that the city of a hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants had been destroyed was scouted. Men smiled and would not believe it. It was the usual exaggeration of the vivid Southern imagination.

At nightfall, however, a man, dazed, terror-stricken and nearly naked, came. He had run along the railway line, a distance of twenty miles or more. He had fainted on the way for want of food. He was followed by two others shortly. They confirmed what the first-comer had related that Messina had been entirely wiped out in half a minute's time; that the population was buried beneath the fallen houses.

Until then men and women had thought but of their own troubles: the panic of the early morning and the great danger they had run. Now the conversation in the streets turned to the graver topic, and

This curious phenomenon, of electric origin, was seen by a friend, who related the occurrence to me.

stupefied wonder took the place of fear. From that time Death all eloquent has been the dread master of eastern Sicily. 'Messina non è più.' It was first whispered in doubt and perplexity. Then it was borne to all lands as a faithful message of woe unprecedented. 'Messina non è più.' Messina, the Beautiful,' exists no longer. No words can paint in true colours the hideousness of what she is to-day, of the first hours of trial through which she and her people have just passed.

The poet 2 must have pictured some such scene when he wrote:

An universal horror

Struck through my eyes, and chilled my very heart:

The cheerful day was everywhere shut out

With care, and left a more than midnight darkness

Such as might e'en be felt.

But not even the mightier pen of a Euripides could describe adequately the hideous and far-reaching torment of those who have suffered by those awful throes of Nature.

It is well to pass over, without further comment, the episodes of heartrending mental anguish and bodily injury; the sufferings from thirst and hunger; the isolation and abandonment of the first days; the terror of continued shocks; the raging fires; the nakedness; the hopeless searchings for missing relatives; the shrieks and lingering tortures of the thousands beneath the fallen masonry to whom help never came, which other pens have described.

'Messina non è più.' The long line of stately palaces which looked upon the harbour and the lilac mountains of Calabria are now but mounds of lime dust and broken stone, of beams and broken tiles. Where a façade stands, it stands in mockery to cover the ruin within, because back and side and inner walls lie in heaps to the level of firstfloor windows. The broad quay has sunk several feet. Where boxes of fragrant fruits and bales of silk and merchandise once were seen, the sea leaps over stones displaced. Whole streets have disappeared; and did one wish to seek where a friend had lived and now has died, nothing remains to guide him to the spot.

Nature has been capricious in her modes of destruction. A solitary house remains erect where all else has fallen. But its walls are rent with broad fissures, which widen with each fresh movement of the earth and it is but a make-believe to beguile the onlooker. Here, the front has fallen, leaving the building with rooms exposed like a doll's house with open door. The rooms are undisturbed and furnished, as of old, with a breakfast-table laid in one; beds and furniture are intact in others, with mirrors on the walls, the doors ajar through which the occupants had endeavoured to escape. There, slender and giant columns of masonry stand upright, or lean against

2 Rowe.

opposite walls tilted over bodily. Below are fragments of what the houses contained. Pianos half buried, chairs, tables, curtains, bedsteads, pictures and broken mirrors; and it is sad and solemn to look upon the mattresses upon which some poor victims had met their fate when sleeping peacefully. The havoc is fearsome; the destruction complete. Only the houses of two stories remain as possible, if risky, habitations in the future.

Perhaps the most remarkable, and the most pitiful of the ruins, are those of the Duomo or Cathedral, which has stood so many centuries, now to be overthrown. The monster monoliths of granite with gilded capitals, which once were the columns of Neptune's Temple at Faro, lie half or wholly covered by the painted woodwork and débris of the roof, among which are fragments of marble tombs and inlaid altars, golden figures of angels and sculptured saints-a mountain of ruined masonry many feet high and open to the sky. The beautifully carved pulpit has been hurled to the ground, together with the pillar which supported it, with the mosaic and frescoes, with the arches and cornices, which made the Duomo so rich a treasure house of art.

One thing alone remains of the ancient glory-the colossal figure of Christ in mosaic in the dome of the apse at the east end. It is still there, with serene countenance and hand uplifted in the act of blessing, as for five hundred years or more it has remained, gazing benignly on the passing generations of worshippers. The calmness of that majestic, lifelike figure was startling. I turned from it resentfully. 'How can a blessing rest on such awful destruction as this?' I exclaimed involuntarily. Then it was suggested that that benediction might reach beyond the church, beyond the fallen walls of the ruined city, a message of peace and consolation in their hour of need to souls in sore anguish of mind and body; and I was glad that the apse had not been destroyed.

Not only did the earth claim its many victims. The sea also added its terrors to the calamity. In a manner it was more far-reaching in its destruction, for where the earthquake sought and destroyed the living only, the seismic waves swept over the English cemetery, razing its walls to the ground, demolishing the tombs and marble monuments of the dead.

To the villages of the Messina littoral the sea brought, perhaps, greater ruin than the earth. A wall of water, in some places ten feet, in others thirty feet high, rushed inland with terrific force, and devastated groves and gardens, roads and houses. Crowds on the quays and shores were swept away and drowned. Lemon trees and big bushes of cactus-pear were torn up by the roots and scattered in dire confusion. Boats on the beach were lifted and carried a distance of two hundred yards, where they yet remain scattered in the fields and streets, or jammed in the narrow doorways through which the receding

VOL. LXV-No. 386

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waters rushed. Houses were either washed away or fell in a pile of masonry. If many victims were carried out to sea, others remained beneath the stones. The lamentation of the surviving villagers, for many days out of reach of succour, was piteous and heartrending. One woman, who had lost her only son, had recovered a portion of his clothes from the ruins of her small house. These she handled fondly, or put them about her shoulders, laughing and weeping alternately. When laughter accompanies tears surely the lowest depth of mental suffering has been reached.

A few steps from her a man sat on the pile of stones and dust which had been his home. Beside himself with grief, he addressed the heap of rubbish: If the sea has not got them, they are here, here beneath my feet,' he said. He referred, no doubt, to his wife and three children who had been borne away by the waves. Another incident is related. A man, who had escaped with the rest of his family, returned hurriedly to look for a missing child. The bed on which the latter had slept was there, though the back wall of the house had fallen. In place of the child he found a live fish where the infant had been lying. Nature seems to have been grotesque as well as cruel.

The immediate and almost universal effect that the earthquake had on those who escaped death was of stupefaction, almost of mental paralysis. They were stunned. Their power of judication of the catastrophe was suspended. Lamentation was infrequently heard except when caused by physical suffering. Tears were rarely seen. Men recounted how they had lost wife, mother, brothers, sisters, children, and all their possessions with no apparent concern. They told their tales of woe as if they themselves had been disinterested spectators of another's loss. Some even spoke with a smile on their lips. Anyone who does not know the Sicilian and his remarkable regard for family ties might have been inclined to attribute that composure to callousness. He would have been wrong. For the time being, the minds of the people had been mercifully deadened. They had not realised. Therein Nature had shown tardy pity.

In one of my visits to the stricken villages I offered a seat in the motor-car to an official. He had gone out from Messina in search of lost relatives. He told me he had escaped miraculously from his falling house, by which his wife had been buried and killed and his daughter horribly mutilated. He could get no news of his son at school at Reggio; he was certain he too was dead. But no sign of sorrow, nor even of mental disturbance, was apparent as he spoke. Beyond a strange perfunctoriness in his actions during the hour or more he was with me (he willingly lent a hand to extricating the car from the sand of the seashore on which it had been driven in the hope of reaching Messina, the road being impassable owing to fallen walls), I saw no sign of the despair which would follow later. Another man told me, with eagerness and satisfaction, how he had escaped

after three days of imprisonment below the ruins of the house where others of his family had met their death. He had had nothing to eat; he had no recollection of the passing of time. Indeed, when rescued he thought he had been buried a few hours only. He had scraped at the debris with his bleeding fingers until he had groped near enough to the surface to make his cries heard. He, too, uttered no complaint, no lamentation. Seemingly it had been to him an adventure which was not altogether unpleasant. Such examples of impassibility are without end. Yet in the eyes of those who lived through that dreadful period a dazed look of horror and consternation lingers as silent witness of the terror which was theirs. The awakening will be terrible.

It is difficult to account for the almost complete, if temporary, absence of the emotion usual on occasions of calamity in people who are naturally easily moved. A Sicilian is not infrequently moved to tears, and by little provocation. A small contretemps is apt to upset the even tenour of his easy-going existence. The trivial illness of a relative, the unexplained absence of a friend, will fill him with apprehension and arouse plaintive comment. But to-day, when he is the sufferer by one of the gravest calamities in the history of the world, he is placid, calm, and resigned.

This is interesting psychologically. That coldness is largely due to the inability of the human brain to appreciate events at their true value. Perception has been dulled by the awful suddenness, as well as by the stunning severity of the blow. There has been also the association or sharing with others, engendering a sense of companionship in misfortune, which forbids one individual to exalt his sorrow over that of others. As suffering is measured by comparison, so is grief kept within bounds in the presence of other grief. Thus the appeal for commiseration which a stricken heart makes on ordinary occasions becomes futile; self-restraint follows as a matter of course, and resignation is its outward manifestation.

But though this may be so in great measure, the onlooker cannot fail to attribute some of that same remarkable resignation to a more lofty cause. Many examples of a noble heroism, passive as well as active, have been noticed. And though Sicily, with her proximity to the East, has not escaped the influence of the Oriental philosophy of 'Che sarà sarà,' which is the native's constant solace in moments of adversity ('Come vuole Dio,' is often his final résumé of a distasteful matter), the fibre of true men and the courage of martyrs have not been wanting in these days of bitter trial.

It has been asked: What has been done to alleviate the woe into which this eastern point of Sicily and Southern Calabria have been plunged? And it is a natural question, since the liberality of the civilised world has been outpoured for that purpose.

Has the nation which now rules the destiny of those regions seized this splendid opportunity of well-doing, and by prompt action and