“All is not over yet,” his uncle proceeded. “The stream, I told you, was going toward the sea. There was, then, a formidable battle between the water and the fire. The lava presented a perpendicular front of 1500 meters in extent and a dozen meters high. At the touch of that burning wall, which continued plunging further and further into the waves, enormous masses of vapor rose with horrible hissings, darkened the sky with their thick clouds, and fell in a salt rain over all the region. In a few days the lava had made the limits of the shore recede three hundred meters. “In spite of that, Catania was still menaced. The stream, swollen with new tributaries, grew from day to day and approached the town. From the top of the walls the inhabitants followed with terror the implacable progress of the scourge. The lava finally reached the ramparts. The fiery flood rose slowly, but it rose ceaselessly; from hour to hour it was found to have risen a little higher. It touched the top of the walls, whereupon, yielding to the pressure, they were overthrown for the length of forty meters, and the stream of fire penetrated the town.” “My goodness!” cried Claire. “Those poor people are lost?” “No, not the people, for lava runs very slowly, on account of its sticky nature, and one can be warned in time; it was the town itself that ran the greatest risk. The quarters invaded by the lava were the highest; from there the current could spread everywhere. So Catania seemed destined to total destruction, when it was saved by the courage of some men who attempted to battle with the volcano. They bethought themselves to construct stone walls, which, placed across the route of the on-coming stream, would change its direction. This device partly succeeded, but the following was the most efficacious. Lava streams envelop themselves in a kind of solid sheath, embank themselves in a canal formed of blocks coagulated and welded together. Under this covering the melted matter preserves its fluidity and continues its ravaging course. They thought, then, that by breaking these natural dikes at a well-chosen spot, they would open to the lava a new route across country and would thus turn it from the town. Followed by a hundred alert and vigorous men, they attacked the stream, not far from the volcano, with blows of iron bars. The heat was so great that each worker could strike only two or three blows in succession, after which he withdrew to recover his breath. However, they managed to make a breach in the solid sheath, when, as they had foreseen, the lava flowed through this opening. Catania was saved, not without great loss, for already the lava flood had consumed, within the town walls, three hundred houses and some palaces and churches. Outside of Catania, this eruption, so sadly celebrated, covered from five to six square leagues with a bed of lava in some places thirteen meters thick, and destroyed the homes of twenty-seven thousand persons.”