and bore destruction to the fated city. Within thirty seconds
perhaps 50,000 persons were killed, and the streets of St. Pierre were
heaped with dead bodies, soon to be incinerated or buried in the ashes
that fell from the fountain of flame. Within ten minutes the city
itself had disappeared in a whirling flame vomited from the mountain,
though for some hours the inflammable portions of the buildings
continued to burn, until all was consumed that could be. The volcano
whose ancient crater for more than fifty years had been occupied by a
quiet lake in which picnic parties bathed, discharged a torrent of
fiery mud, which rolled toward the sea, engulfing everything before
it. The city was no more.

St. Pierre was destroyed, not by lava streams and not by showers of
red-hot rocks, but by one all-consuming blast of suffocating,
poisonous, burning gases. Death came to the inhabitants instantly. It
was not a matter of hours or minutes. It was a matter of seconds. They
did not burn to death. They died by breathing flame and their bodies
were burned afterward. It is not merely true that no person inside the
limits of the town escaped, but it is probably a literal fact that no
person lived long enough to take two steps toward escape. These facts
will go on record as the most astounding in the history of human
catastrophes.

The manner of the annihilation of St. Pierre is unique in the history
of the world. Pompeii was not a parallel, for Pompeii was eaten up by
demoniac rivers of lava, and lava became its tomb. But where St.
Pierre once stood there is not even a lava bed now. The city is gone
from the earth.

The half-dead victims who escaped on the Roddam or were brought away
by the Suchet, talked of a "hurricane of flame" that had come upon
them. That phrase was no figure of speech, but a literal statement of
what happened.

When the first rescue parties reached the scene they found bodies
lying in the streets of the city--or rather on the ground where
streets once were, for in many places it was impossible to trace the
line between streets and building sites--to which death came so
suddenly that the smiles on the faces did not have time to change to
the lines of agony.

That does not mean death by burning, though the bodies had been
charred and half-consumed, nor does it mean suffocation, for
suffocation is slow. It can mean only that the bath of burning fumes
into which the city was plunged affected the victims like a