The Cruise of the Branwen

THE CRUlSE OF THE BRANWEN brought up with great .difficulty. In one long street, twenty feet wide, the sand was piled up twenty feet ·high against the houses on each side. It was impossible to move about in comfort without motor-goggles to protect the eyes and a respirator over the mouth, and all the time the thin drift of heavy dust kept falling. It was scarcely ten minutes' walk from the last edge of the lava stream to the extremity of Pompeii, and as we strolled through its forum and its ghost-like streets the smoke of Vesuvius that had overwhelmed it once seemed menacing a fresh destruction. In the Museum the pitiful remnants of Roman humanity, contorted in the last burning agonies of death, were a fresh and hideous reminder of what the soldiers had been taking out of the smouldering houses only the day before. The attitudes of each were almost identically the same. Torre Annunziata had become another Pompeii. Some of the details described I saw myself; others were told me by Sir Thomas Lipton, who went up into the distressed districts as soon as locomotion of any sort was possible at all. He also put a fast steam launch at our service in order that our ,journey across the bay to Torre Annunziata might be made in the most com– fortable manner possible; and we dined that night on board the Erin, whose decks were so much bigger than our own that there seemed space enough to hoist the little Branwen over the s1cie and lay her on the dinner-table. This eruption of Vesuvius has now almost 34