When daylight came you could no longer see the mountain, although you
could hear it rumbling like thunder.
You could scarcely see across the street, so thick was the ash fog.
The fine dust got into one's eyes and nose, and everything, indoors
and out, was covered with a thick coating of grit.
At the foot of Vesuvius a great stream of red-hot lava mud slid down
the mountain side, straight across fields and roads, and over farms
and villages, slowly but steadily pushing its way, the country people
fleeing before it with such of their property as they were able to
bundle on to carts or carry away with them.
* * * * *
POMPEII.
But on the whole the people were not so frightened after the first
outbreak as one might have expected.
Yet they had every reason to be, because near the mountain stand the
ruins of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, which was overwhelmed, not
by lava, but by just such a fall of ashes from a great eruption of
Vesuvius about thirty years after the death of Christ.
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