ly, though not continuously, extinguishing
the lights, which showed to each band the death-like faces of the other,
and hurrying all to seek refuge beneath the nearest shelter.

The whole elements of civilization were broken up. Ever and anon, by the
flickering lights, you saw the thief hastening by the most solemn
authorities of the law, laden with and fearfully chuckling over the
produce of his sudden gains. If, in the darkness, wife was separated
from husband, or parent from child, vain was the hope of reunion. Each
hurried blindly and confusedly on. Nothing in all the various and
complicated machinery of social life was left save the primal law of
self-preservation!

In parts, where the ashes lay dry and uncommixed with the boiling
torrents, cast upward from the mountain at capricious intervals, the
surface of the earth presented a leprous and ghastly white. In other
places cinder and rock lay matted in heaps, from beneath which emerged
the half-hid limbs of some crushed and mangled fugitive.

The groans of the dying were broken by wild shrieks of women's
terror--now near, now distant--which, when heard in the utter darkness,
were rendered doubly appalling by the crushing sense of helplessness and
the uncertainty of the perils around; and clear and distinct through all
were the mighty and various noises from the fatal mountain; its rushing
winds; its whirling torrents; and, from time to time, the burst and roar
of some more fiery and fierce explosion. And ever as the winds swept
howling along the street, they bore sharp streams of burning dust, and
such sickening and poisonous vapors as took away, for the instant,
breath and consciousness, followed by a rapid revulsion of the arrested
blood, and a tingling sensation of agony trembling through every nerve
and fibre of the frame.

Suddenly all became lighted with an intense and lurid glow. Bright and
gigantic through the darkness, which closed around it like the walls of
hell, the mountain shone--a pile of fire! Its summit seemed riven in
two; or rather, above its surface there seemed to rise two monster
shapes, each confronting each, as demons contending for a world. These
were of one deep blood-red hue of fire, which lighted up the whole
atmosphere far and wide; but _below_, the nether part of the mountain
was still dark and shrouded, save in three places, adown which flowed,
serpentine and irregular, rivers of molten lava. Darkly red through the
profound gloom