“Agnese’s old grandfather. He lay quite still in his bed and went down in it to the lowest floor of the house. The beams fell so as to protect the bed. When we found him he was without a scratch, but quite blind from the dust in his eyes. I shook the old man by the shoulder to rouse him. He turned his blind eyes towards me and cried with the voice of a wounded lion: “‘Leave me in peace! The earth is dying; I die with the earth!’” Arcangelo’s stories of miraculous escapes would fill a volume; that of Marietta is one of the most extraordinary. “Marietta certainly owes her life to me,” he began, “or rather to my ears. You must know that my ears are remarkable--so were my father’s. I have in truth the hearing of a cat. No one else could have heard the faint knocking inside the heap of rubbish that had been Ugo’s workshop. At first I doubted my senses, then I remembered that Marietta lived in the little room behind the carpenter’s shop, and it occurred to me at the same time that Ugo was working at a job in Catania. I gave information and after many hours of hard work the soldiers succeeded in making a space large enough to let down a basket with food and water to the woman buried under the ruins, whose tapping I had heard. I could now hear what she said; she was quite unhurt; her bed had been placed under an arch, the safest place of course, and the arch remained standing; she had not so much as a bruise. The house had fallen so that unless great care was taken the remaining walls would crumble and crush the woman under the arch. The fifth morning I came with a piece of bread and three dried figs I had found in the ruins for her; I made the usual signal; there was no answer. “‘Marietta, canst thou hear?’ I called to her. She did not reply. I put my ear to the hole; what did I hear? A sharp thin voice that wailed and wailed but said no word.