sturbed by what
I thought loud thunder, and when my maid came at 7 a.m. I remarked that
there was a thunder storm, but she said, "No, no; it is the mountain
roaring." It must have been very loud for me to hear, considering my
deafness, and the distance Vesuvius is from Naples, yet it was nothing
compared to the noise later in the day, and for many days after. My
daughter, who had gone to Santa Lucia to see the eruption better, soon
came to fetch me with our friend Mr. James Swinton, and we passed the
whole day at windows in an hotel at Santa Lucia, immediately opposite
the mountain. Vesuvius was now in the fiercest eruption, such as has not
occurred in the memory of this generation, lava overflowing the
principal crater and running in all directions. The fiery glow of lava
is not very visible by daylight; smoke and steam is sent off which rises
white as snow, or rather as frosted silver, and the mouth of the great
crater was white with the lava pouring over it. New craters had burst
out the preceding night, at the very time I was admiring the beauty of
the eruption, little dreaming that, of many people who had gone up that
night to the Atrio del Cavallo to see the lava (as my daughters had done
repeatedly and especially during the great eruption of 1868), some forty
or fifty had been on the very spot where the new crater burst out, and
perished, scorched to death by the fiery vapours which eddied from the
fearful chasm. Some were rescued who had been less near to the chasm,
but of these none eventually recovered.

Behind the cone rose an immense column of dense black smoke to more than
four times the height of the mountain, and spread out at the summit
horizontally, like a pine tree, above the silvery stream which poured
forth in volumes. There were constant bursts of fiery projectiles,
shooting to an immense height into the black column of smoke, and
tinging it with a lurid red colour. The fearful roaring and thundering
never ceased for one moment, and the house shook with the concussion of
the air. One stream of lava flowed towards Torre del Greco, but luckily
stopped before it reached the cultivated fields; others, and the most
dangerous ones, since some of them came from the new craters, poured
down the Atrio del Cavallo, and dividing before reaching the Observatory
flowed to the right and to the left--the stream which flowed to the
north very soon reached the plain, and before night came on had
partially destroyed