File:Greatest wonders of the world (1906) (14789387083).jpg

Identifier: greatestwonderso00sing (find matches)
Title: Greatest wonders of the world
Year: 1906 (1900s)
Authors: Singleton, Esther, d. 1930
Subjects: Curiosities and wonders Landscapes
Publisher: New York, The Christian Herald
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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houses, and traversing the secretchambers of the temples of a religion that has vanishedfrom the earth, and finding so many fresh traces of remoteantiquity : as if the course of Time had been stopped afterthis desolation, and there had been no nights and days,months, years, and centuries since: nothing is more im-pressive and terrible than the many evidences of the search-ing nature of the ashes as bespeaking their irresistiblepower, and the impossibility of escaping them. In thewine-cellars, they forced their way into the earthen vessels:displacing the wine, and choking them, to the brim, withdust. In the tombs, they forced the ashes of the dead fromthe funeral urns, and rained new ruin even into them. Themouths, and eyes, and skulls of all the skeletons werestuffed with this terrible hail. In Herculaneum, where theflood was of a different and a heavier kind, it rolled in, likea sea. Imagine a deluge of water turned to marble, at itsheight—and that is what is called the lava here.
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\ MOUNT VESUVIUS 29 Some workmen were digging the gloomy well on thebrink of which we now stand, looking down, when theycame on some of the stone benches of the theatre—thosesteps (for such they seem) at the bottom of the excavation—and found the buried city of Herculaneum. Presentlygoing down, with lighted torches, we are perplexed by greatwalls of monstrous thickness, rising up between the benches,shutting out the stage, obtruding their shapeless forms inabsurd places, confusing the whole plan, and making it adisordered dream. We cannot, at first, believe, or pictureto ourselves, that this came rolling in, and drowned thecity; and that all that is not here has been cut away, bythe axe, like solid stone. But this perceived and under-stood, the horror and oppression of its presence are inde-scribable. Many of the paintings on the walls in the roofless cham-bers of both cities, or carefully removed to the museum atNaples, are as fresh and plain as if they had been executedyesterday

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