In the orchards and vineyards, the men are strolling home after the day's labour. The shadows lengthen as night comes. Then a strange choking heat engulfs the town. The sea turns to the colour of lead. From deep within the earth comes a muffled rumbling, intermittent at first but soon continuous.
Panic seizes the islanders.
What they could not have known, as they stumbled from their houses clutching a few frantically snatched treasures, was that their town, their island and ultimately their whole civilisation was about to be destroyed by what, according to evidence gathered by volcanologists and seismologists of a later day, has come to rate as one of the most violent volcanic cataclysms the world has ever seen. First came a choking plume of dark smoke. Then a terrible rain of blazing pumice stone, followed by ash, poured down in between explosions blasting up from the cone. At the height if the cataclysm, the volcano itself exploded under enormous internal pressures. With a bang that was heard from one end of the mediterranean to the other and must have sounded like the end of the world, most of the island was blasted into dust.