I felt utterly helpless. My only hope was that Hilda would find the others and that they would come to look for me. At least I could call out to them, signal to them. I had the freedom of that roof-top. I could see what was happening. I wasn’t locked away in some evil-smelling room waiting for death to come suddenly in a fall of masonry. I could move about and watch what happened, and that did more than anything to sustain my courage in the hours that followed.
The stones that had fallen were pumice and hard and sharp. And since the door was my only hope of escape and the stones my only tools, I set to work to rub away the wood. I think I knew it was hopeless from the start. But I had to do something to keep my mind off the red glow of the lava flow piling into the village.
The streams on either side seemed to move faster, flowing down through the open country and curving round below Santo Francisco like two columns mounting a pincer attack on the village of Avin two miles lower down the slopes. The flow coming into Santo Francisco was narrower and slower. But it ate steadily into the village and I could mark its progress by the sound of crumbling buildings and the shower of sparks it set up as it ground over the ruins. I worked it out that it was destroying a house every ten minutes which meant roughly that it would reach my own house in approximately one and a quarter hours. It was then a quarter to six. I had until seven.
I suppose I worked away at that door for half an hour. Then I stopped. I was completely exhausted and dripping with sweat. The heat was already beginning to prick at my skin and my flesh felt tight and shrivelled. I had scraped about a quarter of an inch of wood away on a strip little more than a foot long. It was quite hopeless. The door was of tough, seasoned wood and a good inch thick. I hadn’t a hope of getting through it in time.
Dawn was beginning to break. I brushed the sweat from my eyes and slithered away from the door so that I could look at the mountain. The glow of the crater was fading and in the faint, cold light I could see the dense pall that covered the sky — a writhing, billowing cloud of utter blackness. The lave flow no longer showed as a fiery streak. It was a huge black band coming out of the side of the mountain near the top of the ash slope. It came down like a thick wrist, broadened out into a palm and then split into four fingers. Smoke rose from it in a lazy cloud and the mountain behind it trembled in the heat.
The stump of my leg hurt abominably where Sansevino had kicked at it. My head ached and my lips were swollen and blubbery. I pulled up the leg of my trousers. The flesh where it was drawn tight over the bone was bleeding and coated in grit. Sitting there in the ash I did my best to clean it and then bound it up with a strip torn from my shirt and tied it with my handkerchief. I could have done with some water, not only to cleanse it, but to drink, for my throat was parched with the heat and the acrid sulphur fumes. But it didn’t seem to matter much. The lava was very near now. Buildings were crumbling continuously all along the wide front of its advance into the village and the sound of their falling seemed so close that more than once I looked to see whether the next house had gone.
Then the sun came up. It was an orange disc barely visible through the haze of gas and ash that filled the sky. And as it rose higher it got fainter. I thought of the mountains up there on the back of Italy. The villages would be basking in clear, warm sunlight. And beyond would lie the blue of the Adriatic. And yet here I was under a cloud of ash, faced with a stinking, suffocating end. Something glittered in the ash. It was Zina’s pistol. Sansevino had dropped it in the blindness of his anger. I slipped it into my pocket — if I couldn’t face the lava, then …
I don’t think I was frightened so much as bitter. I could so easily have not been here. If I hadn’t gone out to that villa — if I hadn’t arranged my trip so that I went from Czechoslovakia to Milan. But what was the good of saying If. If I’d been born a Polynesian instead of an Englishman I wouldn’t have lost my leg in three operations that made me sweat to think about. I folded my empty trouser leg up over the stump of my leg and tied it there with my tie. Then I crawled across the roof to the side nearest the lava.
It was full daylight now, or as near to daylight as it would be. I could see the black band of the lava flow broadening out as it piled up against the village. It was only three houses away and as I watched the third house crumbled into mortar dust and disappeared. Only two more houses away now. Three little nigger boys sitting in a row…. The damned bit of doggerel ran in my brain until the second house went. And then there was one. Away to the right I caught a glimpse of the front of the lava choking a narrow street and spilling steadily forward. It was black like clinker and as it spilled down along the street, little rivulets of molten rock flowed red.
The air was full of the dust of broken buildings now. My mouth and throat were dry and gritty with it and the air shimmered with intense heat. I could no longer hear the roar of gases escaping from Vesuvius. Instead my world was full of a hissing and sifting — it was a steady, unrelenting background of sound to the intermittent crash of stone and the crumbling roar of falling plaster and masonry.
Then the next building”began to go. I watched, fascinated, as a crack opened across the roof. There was a tumbling roar of sound, the crack widened, splitting the very stone itself, and then the farther end of the building vanished in a cloud of dust. There was a ghastly pause as the lava consolidated, eating up the pile of rubble below. Then cracks ran splitting all across the remains of the roof not five yards away from me. The cracks widened, spreading like little fast-moving rivers, and then suddenly the whole roof seemed to sink, vanishing away below me in a great rumble of sound and disappearing into the dust of its own fall.
I And as the dust settled I found myself staring at the lava face itself. It was a sight that took my breath away. I wanted to cry out, to run from it — but instead I remained on my hands and one knee staring at it, unable to move, speechless, held in the shock of seeing the pitiless force of Nature angered.
I have seen villages and towns bombed and smashed to rubble by shell-fire. But Cassino, Berlin — they were nothing to this. Bombing or shelling at least leaves the torn shells and smashed rubble of buildings to indicate what was once there. The lava left nothing. Of the half of Santo Francisco that it had overrun there was no trace. Before me stretched a black cinder embankment, quite flat and smoking with heat. It was impossible to think of a village ever having existed there. It had left no trace and I could scarcely believe that only a few minutes before there had been buildings between me and the lava and that I’d seen them toppling, buildings that had been occupied for hundreds of years. Only away to the left the dome of a church stood up out of the black plain. And even as I noticed it the beautifully symmetrical dome cracked open like a flower, fell in a cloud of dust and was swallowed completely.
In my fascination I leaned forward and peered over the balcony. I had a brief glimpse of a great wall of cinders and rivulets of white-hot rock spilling forward across the rubble remains of the house that had just vanished, spilling across the narrow alley and piling up against the house on which I stood. Then the heat was singeing my eyebrows and I was slithering back to the far end of the roof in the grip of a sudden and uncontrollable terror.