[Gutenberg 58455] • Sicily in Shadow and in Sun · The Earthquake and the American Relief Work

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MESSINA. THE CATHEDRAL BEFORE THE DISASTER. Page 50. THE CATHEDRAL AFTER THE DISASTER. Page 50. ARCANGELO'S HOUSE. Page 48. MESSINA. WHERE MARIETTA LIVED. Page5l. are not to be explained but there were many such happenings. Were there any others saved from your house? 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 Mariettalived 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 ...