To walk up through the ash is hard work but it is possible to hire sticks to give help as the way is difficult to the summit of Mount Vesuvius in Italy. It is worth the climb as one gazes into the crater of the volcano where steam or smoke is emitted and one simply hopes that it will not erupt while standing on the rim. It did erupt, of course, on 24th August 79AD. It exploded with great intensity and sent ash and clouds upward into the sky and the nearby cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii were buried under the debris. Thousands lost their lives. The cities were excavated by archeologists hundreds of years later and it is a sobering experience to walk amongst those streets and into houses which were once thriving but now only reveal the rocklike bodies of people who died under the ash and poison gases.
One young man of seventeen years of age named Pliny saw it happen and described what he experienced. He wrote that you could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants and the shouting of men; some were calling for parents, others for children or wives, trying to recognise them by their voices. For many of the people it seemed that the universe had been plunged into eternal darkness for evermore. Thankfully a good number did escape by reaching the harbour and getting on boats indeed many thousands were saved in this way.
