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21 April 1909 — Ca’ Capello, Venice | |
Wednesday. 21st [April 1909]. This morning the Bishop of Gibraltar arrived to stay with me. Telegrams he had sent to announced himself never arrived at all. He had come on his yearly round. I took him out in the afternoon in gondola to the Eden’s garden & in the evening to the Sailor’s Institute where they was the usual weekly concert. The Bishop strikes me as looking very ill & worn; he has injured his health, I fear, by the work he did at Messina where he hastened 2 days after the earthquake. He tells the most harrowing stories of rescue. He worked with the Russian sailors & tells how they tried to dig out someone whose voice they kept hearing calling for help. When it grew dark the sailors were obliged to return to their ship & he could not make up his mind to go away & remained all night—at last overcome with fatigue he fell asleep & only woke at day break—set thro’ with dew—but by then, he added, the voice was silent & I could not forgive myself for having slept. At another time he went down into the ruins of a house & stood in a hole—the beams of a ceiling slowly fell forward on it, stopping so as just to leave him room to stand. Bending down he thrust his hand into a hole & felt a human face still warm, but there was no room to work. He crept on & found another larger hole—there was the mattrass on which lay the victim. With a pen knife the Bishop made a hole in it & proceeded to pull out handfuls of the woollen stuffing wh he handed to the sailors. By degrees the mattrass was emptied—this left room for the person on it to be pulled out by the legs & a boy was saved. The Bishop told us that when the catastrophe happened the Prefect had run away & also the Archbishop—but the latter returned the next day & had nobly done his duty. | |
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