"The big hand of the clock of the Military Hospital had just reached the minute mark of 7:50 a.m. when a great brown cloud was seen to issue from the side of the volcano, followed almost immediately by a cloud of vapory blackness, which separated from it and took a course downward to the sea. Deafening detonations from the interior preceded this appearance, and a lofty white pennant was seen to rise from the summit of the volcano. "With wild fury the black cloud rolled down the mountain slope, pressing closely the contours of the valley along which had previously swept the mud-flow that overwhelmed the factory three days before, and spreading fan-like to the sea. "In two minutes, or less, it had reached the doomed city, a flash of blinding intensity parted its coils, and St. Pierre was ablaze. The clock of the Military Hospital halted at 7:52 a.m.--a historic time-mark among the ruins, the recorder of one of the greatest catastrophic events that are written in the history of the world." Just before the cloud struck, its violet-grey center showed, and the forepart of this was luminous. It struck the town with the fury of a tornado of flame. Whirls of fire writhed spirally about it. The mountain had belched death, death in many forms: death by fire, death by poisonous gases, death by a super-furnace heat, but, principally, death by a sudden suffocation, the fiery and flaming cloud having consumed all the breathable air. Whole streets of houses were mown down by the flaming scythe. Walls three to four feet in thickness were blown away like paper. Massive machinery was crumpled up as if it had been clutched in a titanic white-hot metal hand. The town was raked by a hurricane of incandescent dust and super-heated gas. The violet luminosity, with its writhing serpents of flame, was followed in a second or two by a thousand points of light as the town took fire, followed, almost instantaneously, by a burst of light of every color in the spectrum, as a thousand substances leaped into combustion, and then, in a moment---- Night! An impenetrable cloud of smoke and ash absolutely blotted out the sun. The sky was covered. The hills were hidden. The sea was as invisible as at midnight. Even the grayness of the ash gave back no light; there was none to give. Three seconds had elapsed since the violet-gray cloud of fury struck the town, but in those three seconds 30,000 people lay dead, slain with such appalling swiftness that none knew their fate. No one had tried to escape. The eruption was witnessed, from a distance, by only one trained observer, Roger Arnoux, and a translation of his record is, in part, as follows: "Having left St. Pierre at about five in the evening (May 7) I was witness to the following spectacle: Enormous rocks, being clearly distinguishable, were being projected from the crater to a considerable elevation, so high, indeed, as to occupy a quarter of a minute in their flight.