We arrived opposite St. Pierre May 21, 1902, and saw a smoking, dusty line of ruins along the shore. Before we landed we were warned that if the tug’s whistle should blow we were to make for the boats. The dusty hill lay on our left like a gray snow landscape, not at all like a cone. The crater was a gorge in an ordinary mountain under clouds. We wandered through the dreary ruin and found masonry completely destroyed and no visible large volcanic fragments. The streets were full of rubble, and everything was coated with green-gray powder. Roofs were gone, an occasional timber was burning, and bodies were still numerous in the shells of houses. We saw a baby in an iron cradle, a man face down in a tank, and a big man on his back in a deep baker’s oven. His flesh was shriveled and drawn away from his joints by heat. Elsewhere eight or ten bodies were crowded at the foot of a cliff. [Illustration: _3. Explosion cloud rising from Halemaumau during explosive eruption, May 13, 1924_] [Illustration: _4. Crag in lava lake, January 23, 1918_] The end of the town toward the volcano, all backed by cliffs, was deeply buried under gravel, but the southern end had a covering of only a foot or two of sand. The second explosion was greater than the first one, demolishing third storeys and the second belfry of the cathedral. The beautiful bells “whose soft liquid notes used to ring across the bay with touching cadence at the Angelus hour” lay tumbled in rubbish, splinters, and steaming vapors; their ancient embossed inscriptions half buried in dust. The bodies were mostly shriveled to a crisp from the second eruption, for earlier the bodies had not been much altered. The odor was a haunting one that returned in dreams--of foundry, steam, sulfur matches, and burnt stuff, and every now and then a whiff of roast, decayed flesh that was horrible. It was impossible to realize that this Pompeii had been a thriving French town two weeks before. Not a roof was left, and scarcely a timber; steam came through little holes in the wet brown sand, and a sickening whiff showed whence it came. It was hard to distinguish where streets had been. Everything was buried under fallen walls of cobblestone and pink plaster and tiles, including 20,000 bodies. A New England town would have blown away as white ashes before the giant blowpipe acting on the flame of burning rum. I looked toward the gray old volcano, with shrouded summit. The landscape was dusty, like old statuary. Mountain slope and cliff were denuded of trees. An overturned factory boiler had holes punctured by flying stones. A circular marble fountain basin was chipped away on the volcano side by bombardment. Old cannon used as mooring posts at the quay had been uprooted violently. The green landscape ended abruptly at the city along a sharp line, with coconut palms half green, half brown. There was no motion except steam jets on Pelée’s slopes.