Word: lavas
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Santa Maria has jutted high in the backbone of the Sierra Madre, breathing acrid vapors against the blue Guatemalan sky. Never since the eruption of 1902 has it done much more than that. Planters grew used to the rumblings of Holy Mary, dug through the sterile crust of lava on her flanks to plant coffee bushes in the rich soil beneath. In recent years aviators have used the white plume from her crater as a beacon. Ten days ago Pilot D. G. Richardson, operations manager of the Mexican division of Pan American Airways, flying north on his regular trip from...
Last week Pilot Richardson returned. The smoke over Santa Maria was grey and ominous. For miles around the verdure was burnt and hideous. Pilot Richardson swung his plane lower. Haciendas, coffee plantations had disappeared. The flanks of Santa Maria were streaked with wrinkled beds of steaming lava, moving in ponderous streams toward the sea. In the midst of the lava stream a little hill made an island of refuge. On it huddled a group of the same peons who had waved to him three days earlier, men, women, children. They were completely marooned. Inch by inch the lava stream crept...
...Guatemala City, Pilot Richardson learned more details. Only a few hours of rumbling prefaced the eruption. Three hundred to 400 persons were reported killed. Eight important coffee plantations were destroyed. Red hot lava had buried the village of El Patrocinio deeper than Pompeii...
Colonel Daniel Hernandez, Guatemalan Minister of Promotion, visited the scene of the eruption at once, approached as close as possible to the lava stream and reported blackened corpses, like raisins on a pudding, carried along on its surface. Came an official bulletin...
...Feather-soft ashes, not hard lava buried Pompeii, preserved...