As I advanced, and gradually ascended close to it upon the S. E., and looking north, literally nothing remained standing, upon the crest, but the Castello Cilliberti (Photog. No. 251). Its roofs and floors were fallen in, its towers split or fallen, and many of its massive, indurated, ancient, and buttressed walls prostrated. All the upper part of the town, that which had been the most thickly built upon and densely inhabited, was now strewed around in featureless ruin; acres of ground were covered and heaped, with rounded mounds and sloping avalanches of white and dusty debris, but not a wall, or even the base of one, standing or visible.
Upon the very summit (to the right of the Castello Cilliberti, Photog. No. 251) may be seen projecting above the mass of rubbish the solitary fragment remaining erect of the ancient church,—a building of enormous solidity, massive, and ancient—and whose masonry, indurated by time, attested, by the enormous blocks in which some of its quoins were dislodged, its resistance to the terrible violence of the shock here. These are seen from a closer point of view in Photog. No. 252, looking nearly northward.
It was not, however, until having passed beneath the town, to the north of it, and looked back upon it, that the awful character of its desolation became fully developed.
Seen from this side (Photog. No. 253) the summit and far down the slope all round, presented nothing but a rounded knoll—shadowless and pale—of chalky stone and rubbish, without line or trace of street or house remaining; it might have seemed an abandoned stone quarry, or the rubbish of a chalk pit, save that its rounded and monotonous outline, was broken here and there by beams and blackened timbers that rooted in the rubbish stood thrown up in wild confusion
