“Snuffed out,” Bonanno said, “or so we hope, like so many rush candles.” A few steps farther on the King met four soldiers carrying a wounded officer on a litter. The King glanced at the man and a flash of recognition lighted his face. “_Fermate!_” he cried. The bearers set down the litter; the King propped the poor head, rolling helplessly from side to side, with a fragment of gray military cloak folded for a pillow, wiped the ashen face, and whispered the one brave word ever on his lips “_Coraggio!_” The streets through which the King passed were mountains of rubbish, the houses heaps of ruins, the air pestilential; the fire still burned in many places, and the smell of roasting flesh was simply overpowering. The few survivors who hung about the ruins added to the despair of the scene; some crazed with hunger, thirst, despair, behaved like maddened children; they talked of their dead or lost families with the terrible indifference of the insane; their minds were not strong enough to grasp what had happened. Others, oftenest women, appealed to every passer-by, imploring help in their frenzied efforts to reach some beloved being buried under tons of masonry. A woman tearing desperately with her bare hands at a huge mass of stone it would have taken a regiment of men a week to move recognized the King; she ran as if in frantic haste, threw [Illustration: MESSINA. THE BARRACKS. _Page 43._] [Illustration: MESSINA. RUINS OF A CHURCH. _Page 44._] [Illustration: MESSINA. DIGGING FOR THE BURIED-ALIVE. _Page 47._] [Illustration: THE KING AT MESSINA. _Page 45._] herself at his feet, raised her bleeding hands in an agony of appeal. “_Maestá, aiuto!_ Save them! They are alive. I hear them, my husband, my son, my only son.” “It is too much,” the King broke from her with a sob. “Help her, you others, if you can,” he cried to his aides and pushed on through the ghastly ruin of what three days ago had been the famous Marina, one of the most beautiful streets in the world. “The King’s walk through Messina,” said Bonanno the _avvocato_ who followed him, “was like the walk of Dante and Virgil through the Inferno. At every step raving men, weeping women clutched at him, clung to him, stretched out their hands to him. Those hands! I dream of them now, hairy hands of men, transparent hands of women, old shrivelled hands with gripping fingers, chubby hands of little children lifted to the King, as if he could help them. I would not have been in his place, no, not for three kingdoms.” From that desperate throng one tragic figure must stand out clear in the King’s memory as it does in Bonanno’s--the Deputy Ludovico Fulci pacing back and forth before the ruin of his brother’s house. Though Bonanno knew him well, he did not at first recognize him; in four days the deputy had grown twenty years older.