had been protected
by being under a wooden staircase. She showed no sign of life and it was
already four days since the disaster. They wetted her lips with marsala
and poured some into her mouth and thus restored her. Giuseppe told me
that nothing made more impression on him than seeing this woman's breast
begin to heave as life returned.

The soldiers had to shoot the horses and dogs for eating the corpses, and
the thieves for pilfering. The horses had escaped from their stables,
which were broken by the earthquake, and the dogs had come in from the
country. And besides the pilfering they told me of other things the
doing of which had better be ignored by those who seriously cultivate the
belief that civilisation and education have already so transformed human
nature that all restraints may be safely removed, things which,
nevertheless, were done by human beings in Messina while the houses were
tottering during the closing days of 1908 and the opening weeks of 1909.
I inquired whether the townspeople were themselves guilty of these
horrors and they said: No. The bad things were done by people who came
into the city from the country, like the dogs, and across the straits
from Calabria to take advantage of the catastrophe. As my friend Peppino
Fazio in Catania put it:

"The earthquake was very judiciously managed; it killed only the wicked
townspeople; it did not touch the good ones, they all escaped."

Giuseppe's brother, Giovanni Platania, is a scientific man and a
professor; he went often from Catania to Messina during the early part of
1909 to study the behaviour of the sea during the earthquake--the
maremoto. He has embodied the results of his researches in an opuscolo
on the subject _Il Maremoto dello Stretto di Messina del 28 Dicembre_
1908 (Modena. Societa Tipografica Modenese, 1909). It took him twelve
hours to return to Catania from one of his first visits; the journey in
ordinary times is performed by the express in two hours and a half.
There was no charge for the tickets because it was the policy of the
authorities to empty the town; in this way malefactors who escaped from
the prison got easily away. In the train was a woman who talked, saying
that no one could blame her for travelling to Catania free, especially as
she had not deserved to be put in prison--she had been put there for
nothing. There was also a man who did not exactly say he was a thief,
but he informed his fellow-travellers tha