Perhaps the most marvellous narrative of an escape from an
eruption ever recorded, is that given in a letter from a Mr. Narlian describing a volcanic outburst in the Lipari Islands on August 3rd. Mr. Narlian and his children were in their home on the watch for the eruption. They had, however, retired to bed for a short rest, when red-hot stones, none less than two feet in diameter, began to fall in showers upon the house. Very soon one came crashing through the ceiling a few yards from Mr. Narlian and his children. In attempting to fly, they found great difficulty in opening the doors of the shaking house, and in the verandah a stone fell actually at their feet, burning the children's legs. None, however, touched them, and they reached the shore in safety, though before they could get there the whole country had been set on fire, and "huge boulders and stones were literally raining everywhere." Panic-stricken men had seized their only boat, and they had to wait for several hours till help came from one of the neighbouring islands. On revisiting his home, Mr. Narlian found the whole neighbourhood strewn with huge boulders,—one of them thirty feet in diameter, and buried in the sand to the depth of ten or eleven feet. It is difficult to conceive anything more terrible than these huge red-hot boulders thundering through the air, and crashing down in an overwhelming storm of destruction upon the ground below. Volcanic eruptions do not kill like floods, but they affect the imagination far more forcibly. They strike a chord of horror in bvery sense.
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