MARVELLOUS SIGHT SEEN FROM NAPLES.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVII, Issue 86, 10 April 1906, Page 5

MARVELLOUS SIGHT SEEN FROM NAPLES.

INCANDESCENT ROCKS THREE THOUSAND FEET HIGH.

THE FIRST NEWS FROM THE THREATENED VILLAGES.

(Received 7.35 a.m.)

ROME, April 0. Vesuvius, which for the past few days had been growing more and more threatening, reached a tremendous height of energy to-day, and in a few hours swept away the funicular railway, destroyed the observatory, and engulphed several persons, the exact number of whom is still to be ascertained. In Naples the days had been aays of anxiety ana "oreboding, and it was generally felt that an eruption of unheard-of magnitude was at hand. To-day brought the realisation, and from all quarters there was witnessed one of the most appallingly grand natural phenomena ever beheld. Away to the east, its outlines shrouded in deepest obscurity, the volcano hurled forth thousands of glowing rocks, beautiful in their incandescant whiteness. These were discharged to a height of fully three thousand feet, and most of them fell back over tne cone from which they had been discharged. Meantime the air was rent by deafening explosions, and ashes fell over Naples in a steady shower. A continuous procession of thousands of refugees from the districts beyond (to the south and south-east of) Vesuvius brought tidings of how the immediately-threatened country had fared under the vast outburst that from Naples looked so tremendous that it seemed as though nothing could be spared from the fell force of the torrents of matter cast up and lost somewhere away to the eastward. stated that appalling earthquakes are proceeding in the villages at the base of the volcano. A vast stream of lava twenty feet high and 600 feet wide had swept rapidly towards the famous port of Torre dell' Annunziata (population 20,060), on the south base of the mountain. This town was precipitately abandoned. I Subsequent observations show that the flow is for the time at least slackening in volume. The famous observatory, where many valuable seismic and other data have been collected by the famous Melloni and Professor Palmieri, the present observer, was probably destroyed at; an early stage in the outbreak. The funicular railway, by which visitors ascended to the crater of the volcano, and which was erected by Messrs Thomas Cook and Sons for their tourist traffic, was also swept away during the eruption. Several persons have been killed and others are mining from San Giuseppe, but exaot figures are not yet available.