The collar project that started on Monday continues today. In yesterday's post we left the protagonist of my story in the middle of the 1944 Vesuvius eruption so let's move from there.
...Smoke rises from the crater extending for miles, the earth shakes with tremendous roars and a few minutes after each quake, debris blown out of the crater start hitting the ground.
She is on board of a B-25 bomber flying over the crater. The entire plane vibrates as she passes over the volcano. She sees the streams of red lava at the rim of the crater forming outflows of vivid orange molten rock.
Lava flows down the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, splitting into devilish tongues extending towards the surrounding areas. Fiery coals shoot thousands of feet into the air, the sky lights up and is bright for miles around. It's a blazing inferno, the world around her is on fire.
A rock hits her windshield, cracking it, and she starts precipitating, a silent scream rises and dies in her throat. She closes her eyes in fear, but when she opens them again she is back on the ground, wearing a steel helmet and a sheepskin jacket for protection from the falling material. She is sitting in an open truck together with a group of people being evacuated.
Everything boils around her, a rain of black stones of all sizes falls in great quantity, completely covering the ground, hitting the trees and breaking their branches; the crater spits lava that, running in streams, leaves behind only devastation.
A man and a woman sitting next to her are carrying a small religious figure under a glass dome. They are covering their heads with a large heavy basket to protect themselves from the deluge of rocks and volcanic ash. The man puts his hand in his jacket pocket, takes out a small red box and puts it in her hands.
She looks at the volcano and sees clouds passing across the top of the mountain, then turns to the box. It looks old and, on its cover, a typewritten label spells out in Italian “Lapilli from the Vesuvius eruption, 22/26 March 1944”.
She picks the rocks one by one to examine them and lingers on the covelline piece. She looks at it closely, trying to get lost through the intense indigo blue shades of the rock, but, slowly, the covelline mutates colour, assuming a different shade of vibrant blue, more similar to that of lapis lazuli.
Where will this new shade of blue take her? Follow the final installment of the story on tomorrow's post to discover it.
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