Saddle the Wind (65 page)

‘Holy Christ,’ Alfredo muttered, ‘– an earthquake.’

The first tremors of the quake were felt just after five-twenty that morning of December 28th, 1908. Many further shocks were felt during the rest of the day and over the days that followed, gradually diminishing in number and intensity as the days and the weeks passed by. But it was during the first minutes of the appalling catastrophe that the greater part of Messina, second largest city in Sicily, was utterly destroyed.

In the worst earthquake in Sicily’s recorded history Messina and her surrounding towns and villages about the eastern coast were razed to the ground, with varying degrees of devastation occurring as far inland to the west as the town of Caltanisetta, almost at the centre of the island and over two hundred miles away. On the far side of the Messina Straits to the north-east, on the toe of the mainland of Italy, the town of Reggio di Calabria also suffered the most terrible destruction. It was at Messina, however, where the catastrophe reached its most devastating heights and where loss of life was at its worst. Prosperous, popular Messina, ancient city of treasures – with all its history of earthquakes and other disasters it was totally unprepared for the horror of that night and for what was to follow.

Just before dawn the sleeping inhabitants were awakened by a sudden upheaval of the earth. The first violent tremor lasted several seconds, the shock racing northeast and south-west from the quake’s centre in the
middle of the Straits. It was, however, a mere presage of what was to follow. After an ominous lull of only a moment or two there came the major part of the catastrophe.

Suddenly, accompanied by a dull rumbling sound, the earth began to move again, a convulsive shaking that seemed to go on and on. This, the greatest of the shocks, lasted for some thirty-two seconds. It was in this period that the city of Messina was destroyed.

With the warning given by the first, short upheaval, some of the city’s people were able to scramble from their beds and make a run for safety before the more calamitous effects of the major quake took their toll. While the earth shook people poured from their houses, their cries of
‘Terremoto’
(earthquake) and their prayers to God and the saints quickly drowned by the terrifying sounds of the collapse of buildings. Beginning with a series of loud, thundering crashes which grew in intensity, the noise culminated in one prolonged, stupendous crash as most of the city fell in ruins.

Out into the streets streamed thousands of terrified people, while all around them bricks and mortar, roofs and walls and chimneys crashed down. Of those citizens who escaped safely from devastated houses, hotels and other buildings, many ran for the open spaces of the docks where there would be no risk from falling masonry. Within minutes they were pouring onto the quays, running to the water’s edge, as far from the town’s collapsing buildings as they could get. It was then, just when they thought they were safe, that they encountered a new danger.

The middle of the Messina Straits being the core of the shock, the seabed suffered unseen and unimagined distortion. Only on the surface could its effects be discerned as great gaping troughs appeared in the sea,
great yawning caverns of water that sucked down ships and boats and spewed them up again on mountainous waves.

A further result of the massive disturbance of the seabed and the water’s displacement was that the sea itself was caused to be drawn from the shoreline of Messina for hundreds of yards – only to go rushing back again minutes later. With a great roar, hurtling forward at incredible speed, a huge seismic wave of water, like some gigantic tidal wave, hurled itself at the Messina shore.

Cargo steamers and mail boats sailing in the Straits were carried shoreward on the wave as if by some unseen giant hand, their crews fighting with all their might to prevent their vessels from capsizing. Of the shipping moored at the docks the smaller craft were picked up and carried inland to be tossed amongst the ruins of the devastated city like so many children’s broken, discarded toys. Larger vessels were wrenched from their moorings, their anchor chains snapping like thread, and, at the total mercy of the wave, were sent crashing into other ships.

On the quays the people who had just arrived in their desperate bid for safety saw the wave approaching. But too late. Rearing high above them, it struck the shore and crashed onwards, carrying with it not only the debris of the ruined harbour buildings but the people themselves who, only seconds before, had glimpsed salvation. Pounding inland for several hundred yards, the wall of water did much to complete the destruction of the buildings and carried everything with it. With its recession it swept not only a mass of debris but also hundreds upon hundreds of drowned and crushed bodies into the sea.

Any work of destruction left undone by the quake
itself and the giant wave would be completed by the fires that swiftly broke out all over the city.

No one in living memory had ever known such devastation, such loss of life. As for the city itself, it appeared to be gone forever.

Signor Marino and his wife, who had been guests of Blanche and Alfredo only two days before, were sleeping in their third floor room of their hotel off the Corso Cavour when the quake struck. The bed on which they lay rose up and began to rock violently. Signora Marino screamed out, clutching at her husband, and the next moment the floor was giving way beneath the bed and the bed was falling. Minutes later signor Marino regained consciousness and found himself lying in a small space amid the rubble, pinned down by a beam. From a few yards away he could hear his wife calling out to him. He tried to move towards her, to help her, but he could not. He began to cry out for help, but his voice was only one of so many voices calling, and no one came. After a few minutes his wife’s voice ceased, but by this time signor Marino himself was dead.

In another, poorer part of the city the tumbler, the little boy with the bright smile and the scarlet tunic, to whom Adriana had given the coins, was snatched from his bed by his father and carried out into the street. Seconds later they both lay dead, killed in an instant by a huge falling block of masonry as the father had hovered, undecided, not knowing where to run for safety.

At the villa on the Via Gabriele Marianne, in her petticoat, was sitting at her dressing table when the quake happened.

A few minutes earlier, downstairs, she had put down her teacup and got up from her chair saying to Betta
that she had better get dressed as her husband would be arriving shortly with signora Pastore. Then, leaving the girl alone by the fire, she had gone upstairs to her dressing room where Lisa came to help her to dress and do her hair.

Lisa, a slight, pretty seventeen-year-old from Catania, had been with Marianne for three years. She was speaking of the Christmas festivals in the city when the first tremors came, and her voice at once came to a halt. The floor beneath them shook, the shaking going on for what seemed endless seconds, while the windows rattled so violently that it seemed that in another moment they must shatter. Marianne and Lisa held their breath. Then, after the slightest pause, the protracted, crescendoing shaking began.

And then everything seemed to happen at once. To the accompaniment of a distant roar, the floor began suddenly to heave and shake at the same time, while the room started to sway. The rattling of the windows became so violent that several of the panes shattered and fell in. The whole earth was being shaken like a rat in a terrier’s mouth. The chandelier above their heads danced crazily, while on a table a little porcelain figure suddenly moved across the polished surface in a weird, vibrating shuffle, a second later falling to the floor with a crash.

Marianne leapt to her feet crying out, ‘An earthquake!’ while Lisa screamed and turned on the spot, helpless in her fear. Rushing to the door, Marianne clutched at the handle.

‘It’s stuck!’ she cried. ‘I can’t open it!’

The handle turned in her grasp but the door would not budge, and she stood pulling at the handle while Lisa screamed and the violent shaking of the room went on and the walls cracked and the mirrors and the pictures began to fall.

Suddenly there was a deafening crash as a nearby house collapsed and fell – and then a series of crashes, each one coming faster upon the heels of the ones before, thousands of crashes eventually mingling in what sounded like one stupendous, prolonged thunderclap as all over the square mile of the city the bricks, mortar, plaster and stone of the roofs and chimneys and walls of the city’s buildings came down.

In those moments when the greater part of the city fell, so most of the walls about Marianne and Lisa fell too, along with those of the adjoining houses giving way to the barrage and collapsing in a cloud of choking dust.

In the little sitting room below, Betta had leapt from her seat as the floor beneath her feet first began to shake, the table rocking and the teacups rattling in their saucers. The door that had been closed suddenly sprung open, and in seconds she was dashing into the hall. Another moment and she was opening the front door and rushing down the steps and out into the night.

While the buildings fell and the earth continued to shake beneath her feet she ran on, as she did so being joined by other terrified people as they dashed out of their collapsing houses. Unlike Betta, most of the panic-stricken citizens had been in bed sleeping when their homes had began to fall about their ears, and now they spilled onto the pavements for the most part clad only in nightclothes or underwear or else completely naked. The narrow streets into which they poured, however, offered them little safety, for there was no space available in which to escape from the falling masonry. And, as the buildings crumpled and fell, so thousands more were crushed to death as they ran.

Betta had reached the end of the Via Gabriele and was just turning, seeing before her the open space of a small piazza, when a loud cracking report sounded above
her head. It spelt the end for her. Before she could dash out of the way, she was struck. A second later she lay dead, crushed beneath the broken stone of a collapsed wall.

In the eastern part of the city Gentry had just arrived in the Piazza San Bernardo in his carriage when the disaster happened. At the first tremors the horse whinnied with fear, kicking at the air with its right forehoof, and Gentry heard the groom’s alarmed mutter of ‘
Earthquake
’. Then, seconds later, as the long, violent shaking of the earth began, making the vehicle shake and rock like something possessed with life, the frightened driver urged the terrified horse into the square’s centre away from the surrounding buildings.

As the cab moved forward, still pitching and tossing, the buildings began to fall and Gentry heard the air filling with cries as people swarmed out into the open, the houses collapsing behind them. A minute before there had been lights in many windows, lights from the oil lamps that customarily burned throughout the nights in many Sicilian homes. Now, with those lights extinguished, the city was momentarily plunged into near darkness. But then, only a moment later, somewhere over to his right a sudden blaze of light sprang up as a fire broke out, a broken oil lamp igniting the escaping gas from a fractured pipe.

With a jerk on the reins the driver had brought the horse to a halt. As he did so a crack appeared in the earth beneath the creature’s belly, and in seconds a fissure was opening, gaping wider, and the horse, with a scream of fear, was falling down, being swallowed up. Gentry, watching in horror, threw open the carriage door and leapt from the lurching vehicle. Falling heavily on his left arm he felt pain shoot up to his shoulder. There was pain too in his right leg. As he turned, rolling on
the ground, he was just in time to see the driver and the carriage follow the horse down into the abyss.

In the glare of the leaping flames Gentry watched, helpless, as others fell into the crevasse – a woman running with a child in her arms, an elderly man, another woman, a dog barking wildly and dashing madly round and round in circles – all toppled into the abyss. And then, amazed, he saw the jaws of the earth close again, and then open once more, widening by the second, its split running across the piazza and claiming yet more victims in its wildly zigzagging course.

‘Quick! Outside!’

Alfredo shouted the command at Blanche, and she cried out, ‘
Adriana!
’ but he was already turning, moving to the dining room. The door rattled as he turned the handle and threw it open, while at the same time there came Adriana’s voice again, her frightened cries ringing out against the terrifying rumbling and shaking of the earth. A second later Alfredo was sweeping Adriana up in his arms and, out in the hall again, was turning and running for the front door. ‘Quick!’ he cried, ‘the house is going to fall!’ Blanche dashed ahead of him, snatching at the bolts, wrenching them back. In another moment they were running down the steps into the street. As they fled there came the first sounds of cracking masonry, brick, plaster and wood, soon to be followed by the terrifying noise of the falling walls, chimneys and roofs.

In the dark they dashed on, while all around them buildings were beginning to collapse upon each other, the thundering crashes of their fall drowning the terrified screams of their panic-stricken occupants who tried to run from them into the open. Not knowing the city well Blanche had no idea where Alfredo was going,
though he appeared to be heading towards the sea. Then he was crying out to her, ‘Down to the quays – where there’s open space. We must get to the quays.’

Against the thundering crashes of the falling city they ran on through the narrow streets while the houses crumpled and fell on either side, stone, brick and concrete smashing onto the pavement within feet of them, raising clouds of dust that filled their throats and made them cough and choke. Fires were breaking out everywhere, lighting up the scene as the streets filled with half-naked, screaming people, running, staggering, limping, all trying to escape from the falling buildings. At Blanche’s right a young girl emerged from a dust-clouded doorway of a partly wrecked house. In the glare of flames Blanche saw blood streaming down her face. As the girl staggered against the wall the balcony high above her head tilted and fell. In an instant she lay crushed. Wherever the light was sufficient Blanche could see people lying among the ruins.