the Military Hospital halted at 7:52 a.m.--a historic time-mark
among the ruins, the recorder of one of the greatest catastrophic events
that are written in the history of the world."

Just before the cloud struck, its violet-grey center showed, and the
forepart of this was luminous. It struck the town with the fury of a
tornado of flame. Whirls of fire writhed spirally about it. The mountain
had belched death, death in many forms: death by fire, death by
poisonous gases, death by a super-furnace heat, but, principally, death
by a sudden suffocation, the fiery and flaming cloud having consumed all
the breathable air.

Whole streets of houses were mown down by the flaming scythe. Walls
three to four feet in thickness were blown away like paper. Massive
machinery was crumpled up as if it had been clutched in a titanic
white-hot metal hand. The town was raked by a hurricane of incandescent
dust and super-heated gas.

The violet luminosity, with its writhing serpents of flame, was followed
in a second or two by a thousand points of light as the town took fire,
followed, almost instantaneously, by a burst of light of every color in
the spectrum, as a thousand substances leaped into combustion, and then,
in a moment----

Night!

An impenetrable cloud of smoke and ash absolutely blotted out the sun.
The sky was covered. The hills were hidden. The sea was as invisible as
at midnight. Even the grayness of the ash gave back no light; there was
none to give.

Three seconds had elapsed since the violet-gray cloud of fury struck the
town, but in those three seconds 30,000 people lay dead, slain with
such appalling swiftness that none knew their fate. No one had tried to
escape.

The eruption was witnessed, from a distance, by only one trained
observer, Roger Arnoux, and a translation of his record is, in part, as
follows:

"Having left St. Pierre at about five in the evening (May 7) I was
witness to the following spectacle: Enormous rocks, being clearly
distinguishable, were being projected from the crater to a considerable
elevation, so high, indeed, as to occupy a quarter of a minute in their
flight.

"About eight o'clock of the evening we recognized for the first time,
playing about the crater, fixed fires that burned with a brilliant white
flame. Shortly afterwards, several detonations, similar to those that
had been heard at St. Pierre, were noted coming from the south, which
confirmed me in my opinion that there a