It was during one of these festivals, on the 23d of November, 79, that the terrible eruption which overwhelmed the city burst forth. The testimony of the ancients, the ruins of Pompeii, the layers upon layers of ashes and scoriæ that covered it, the skeletons surprised in attitudes of agony or death, all concur to tell us of the catastrophe. The imagination can add nothing to it: the picture is there before our eyes; we are present at the scene; we behold it. Seated in the amphitheatre, we take to flight at the first convulsions, at the first lurid flashes which announce the conflagration and the crumbling of the mountain. The ground is shaken repeatedly; and something like a whirlwind of dust, that grows thicker and thicker, has gone rushing and spinning across the heavens. For some days past there has been talk of gigantic forms, which, sometimes on the mountain and sometimes in the plain, swept through the air; they are up again now, and rear themselves to their whole height in the eddies of smoke, from amid which is heard a strange sound, a fearful moaning followed by claps of thunder that crash down, peal on peal. Night, too, has come on--a night of horror; enormous flames kindle the darkness like the blaze of a furnace. People scream, out in the streets, "Vesuvius is on fire!" On the instant, the Pompeians, terrified, bewildered, rush from the amphitheatre, happy in finding so many places of exit through which they can pour forth without crushing each other, and the open gates of the city only a short distance beyond. However, after the first explosion, after the deluge of ashes, comes the deluge of fire, or light stones, all ablaze, driven by the wind--one might call it a burning snow--descending slowly, inexorably, fatally, without cessation or intermission, with pitiless persistence. This solid flame blocks up the streets, piles itself in heaps on the roofs and breaks through into the houses with the crashing tiles and the blazing rafters. The fire thus tumbles in from story to story, upon the pavement of the courts, where, accumulating like earth thrown in to fill a trench, it receives fresh fuel from the red and fiery flakes that slowly, fatally, keep showering down, falling, falling, without respite.