“YESTERDAY,” Uncle Paul resumed, “Jules asked me if the lava-streams could not reach towns situated near volcanoes. The following story will answer his question. It is about an eruption of Mount Etna.”

“Etna is that volcano in Sicily where the big chestnut tree of a hundred horses is?” asked Claire.

“Yes. I must tell you that two hundred years ago there occurred in Sicily one of the most terrible eruptions on record. During the night, after a furious storm, the earth began to tremble so violently that a great many houses fell. Trees swayed like reeds shaken by the wind; people, fleeing distracted into the country to avoid being crushed under the ruins of their buildings, lost their footing on the quaking ground, stumbled, and fell. At that moment Etna burst in a fissure four leagues long, and along this fissure rose a number of volcanic mouths, vomiting, amid the crash of frightful detonations, clouds of black smoke and calcined sand. Soon seven of these mouths united in an abyss that for four months did not cease thundering, glowing, and throwing up cinders and lava. The crater of Etna, at first quite at rest, as if its furnaces had no connection with the new volcanic mouths, woke up a few days after and threw to a prodigious height a column of flames and smoke; then the whole mountain shook, and all the crests that dominated its crater fell into the depths of the volcano. The next day four mountaineers dared to climb to the top of Etna. They found the crater very much enlarged by the falling-in of the day before: its orifice, which before had measured one league, now measured two.

“In the meantime, torrents of lava were pouring from all the crevasses of the mountain down upon the plain, destroying houses, forests, and crops. Some leagues from the volcano, on the seacoast, lies Catania, a large town surrounded then by strong walls. Already the liquid fire had devoured several villages, when the stream reached the walls of Catania and spread over the country. There, as if to show its strength to the terrified Catanians, it tore a hill away and transported it some distance; it lifted in one mass a field planted with vines and let it float for some time, until the green was reduced to charcoal and disappeared. Finally, the fiery stream reached a wide and deep valley. The Catanians believed themselves saved: no doubt the volcano would exhaust its strength by the time it covered the vast basin which the lava had just entered. But what an error of judgment! In the short space of six hours, the valley was filled, and the lava, overflowing, advanced straight toward the town in a stream half a league wide and ten meters high. It would have been all over with Catania if, by the luckiest chance, another current, whose direction crossed the first, had not come and struck against the fiery flood and turned it from its course. The stream, thus turned, coasted the ramparts of the town within pistol-shot, and turned toward the sea.”

“I was very much afraid for those poor Catanians,” interposed Emile, “when you spoke of that wall of fire, high as a house, going straight toward the town.”

“All is not over yet,” his uncle proceeded. “The stream, I told you, was going toward the sea. There was, then, a formidable battle between the water and the fire. The lava presented a perpendicular front of 1500 meters in extent and a dozen meters high. At the touch of that burning wall, which continued plunging further and further into the waves, enormous masses of vapor rose with horrible hissings, darkened the sky with their thick clouds, and fell in a salt rain over all the region. In a few days the lava had made the limits of the shore ............