Twelve persons proved to have been killed, two fatally injured,
twenty-four seriously hurt and over a hundred badly bruised and cut.
Among these were many children, whose parents had sent them to do the
marketing without a dream of danger, and the grief of the parents was
intense. The Duke of Aosta, Prefect of Naples, directed the work of
rescue, while his wife assisted in the care of the injured. As the
Duchess bent in the hospital to give a cooling drink to a badly bruised
little girl she felt a kiss upon her hand. Looking down, she saw a woman
kneeling at her feet, who gratefully said: "Your Excellency, she is all
I have. I am a widow. May God reward you."
While this scene of horror was taking place in Naples the fate of the
town and villages grouped around the foot of the volcano seemed as
hopeless as ever. Early on the 10th the showers of ashes and streams
of lava diminished and almost ceased, but later the same day they began
again, and the terrified inhabitants feared that a catastrophe like that
which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum was about to visit them. The lava
which reached the cemetery of Torre Annunziata turned in the direction
of Pompeii as if to freshly entomb that exhumed city of the past. A
violent storm of sulphurous rain fell at San Giuseppe, Vesuviana and
Sariano, and on all sides the fall of sand and ashes came on again in
full strength. Even with the sun shining high in the heavens the light
was a dim yellow, in the midst of which the few persons who still
haunted the stricken towns moved about in the awful stillness of
desolation like gray ghosts, their clothing, hair and beards covered
with ashes.
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