Oh baby! You are a symbol! life never ends! it renews itself, and it is the eternal bloom of strength and beauty. April 22, 1906. IGNIS ARDENS When coming out from the station of the Circumvesuviana at Torre Annunziata, as one goes towards the white and flowery cemetery, which was reported destroyed, but fortunately has not been touched by the fire, one suddenly sees, quite in front of the gate, at seven or eight meters from the wall on the left, a large barrier of black or dark gray stones, and pitch coloured rocks, a rocky irregular barrier closing at a certain distance the restful home of the dead, and one wonders: Is this the lava? Yes, that is the lava. Still, asleep, and dead, it rests now under the sun, having already become a harmless thing, transformed in an arid rocky wall, in a mound of ruins, gathered there in confusion, for an unlimited extension, and going down in an easy slope, like a stair of stones. That is the lava, and who sees it for the first time, must ask himself if, in that accumulation of still things, in that ocean of fused bronze, life has existed, if that mass has not been deposited there by chance, by the untiring arm of gigantic cyclops, and not by its own strength, by its powerful and ardent life of fire. And one smiles almost incredulously, as one would, before a made up spectacle. One would like to tread over those scories, strike them with one's own stick and show them all the contempt that naturally springs from one's souls towards a stone. Stone? Oh no! from the cracks cutting here and there, immense columns of white smoke, tinted with yellow vapours, arise ... and if you look more intensely you perceive many, many more. It is like an immense lighted field, spread all over with smoke, similar to an early dawn in the month of November. That stone is still living. Under those masses, fire is still burning. The blood of the Vulcano beats yet in those stony veins. The terrible thing appears to you then, in all its majestic and frightful grandeur, always burning like the flame of the Vestals. And you understand then more clearly what must have been the terrible spectacle of this slow fall of living and destructive strength advancing little by little, gaining inch by inch the fields and the houses, this invincible strength carrying flames and destruction in its breast, hearing no control, going where it pleased with the caprice of a perverted will and bringing desolation and death every where it has touched. You will well understand, what this rolling red river must have been in the fatal night, with the black sky shrouded with sun, crowned with lightnings like a revengeful divinity, this slow and voracious river, which has swallowed up half a country. You will well understand, how a picturesque little village can have been destroyed in its rich lands, in one of its fractions, in its first houses.