Word: etna
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...people on Sicily's east coast have always lived uneasily in the shadow of Mount Etna, which has erupted 22 times in the past 75 years. Two months ago, Europe's tallest active volcano (10,700 ft.) awoke once again. Down its south face surged a molten ribbon of lava that destroyed a dozen buildings and more than 370 acres of fields and forests, causing millions of dollars' worth of damage...
...river of lava toward the Rifugio di Sapienza, a tourist shelter it had damaged earlier in the spring. Engineer Abersten, weary but unbowed, warned that another precision blast would be required to make the diversion an unqualified success. Said he: "I don't want to be defeated by Etna...
...hears already the night sounds of autumn: slide projectors clicking in the dark to punctuate a drone of travelogue. The oppressed audience writhes and dozes and works its eyes open and shut like jalousies. Etna will be seen in a bleeding, theatrical sunset. The Acropolis will be out of focus, Dorothy sharp in the foreground. Here is Carl squirting himself with a wineskin at Pamplona. Retired professors (triumphs of evolution) will stand over Galapagos turtles, grinning like Teddy Roosevelt after a kill. In some former slave-driving colony of the Caribbean, Dwayne will lounge by the pool wearing his Club...
...region's geology is that the plate bearing the African continent is generally pushing north and trying to slip under the Eurasian plate. That movement, under way for millions of years, created the Alps and has helped to stoke such volcanoes as Sicily's Mount Etna. The devastating 7.2 quake that leveled the Algerian city of El Asnam nearly two months ago, killing more than 2,500, occurred almost precisely at one of the points where the African and Eurasian plates are believed to be thrusting against each other. But the Italian peninsula is also being wrenched...
...best are no longer in print, a sad situation that his own book may help remedy. A single passage by Evelyn Waugh in Labels is more than enough to justify all that roaming around that so many did: "I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of grey smoke with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky. Nothing I have seen...