st houses or temples or sheds--shelter of any
kind--for protection from the terrors of the open air. But darker and
larger and mightier spread the cloud above them. It was a sudden and
more ghastly Night rushing upon the realm of Noon!

Meanwhile the streets were already thinned; the crowd had hastened to
disperse itself under shelter; the ashes began to fill up the lower
parts of the town; but, here and there, you heard the steps of fugitives
cranching them warily, or saw their pale and haggard faces by the blue
glare of the lightning or the more unsteady glare of torches, by which
they endeavored to steer their steps. But ever and anon the boiling
water, or the straggling ashes, mysterious and gusty winds, rising and
dying in a breath, extinguished these wandering lights, and with them
the last living hope of those who bore them.

Amid the other horrors, the mighty mountain now cast up columns of
boiling water. Blent and kneaded with the half-burning ashes, the
streams fell like seething mud over the streets in frequent intervals.
And full, where the priests of Isis had now cowered around the altars,
on which they had vainly sought to kindle fires and pour incense, one of
the fiercest of those deadly torrents, mingled with immense fragments
of scoria, had poured its rage. Over the bended forms of the priests it
dashed: that cry had been of death--that silence had been of eternity!
The ashes--the pitchy stream--sprinkled the altars, covered the
pavement, and half concealed the quivering corpses of the priests!

In proportion as the blackness gathered did the lightnings around
Vesuvius increase in their vivid and scorching glare. Nor was their
horrible beauty confined to the usual hues of fire; no rainbow ever
rivalled their varying and prodigal dyes. Now brightly blue as the most
azure depth of a southern sky--now of a livid and snakelike green,
darting restlessly to and fro as the folds of an enormous serpent--now
of a lurid and intolerable crimson, gushing forth through the columns of
smoke, far and wide, and lighting up the whole city from arch to
arch--then suddenly dying into a sickly paleness, like the ghost of
their own life!

In the pauses of the showers you heard the rumbling of the earth beneath
and the groaning waves of the tortured sea; or, lower still, and audible
but to the watch of intensest fear, the grinding and hissing murmur of
the escaping gases through the chasms of the distant mountain. Sometim