Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/418

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MOUNTAIN REGIONS FAR WESTWARD.

wave-path at St. Arsenio and St. Pietro was, from fissures, 142° to 144° W. of north.

Much further away to the westward, (10 to 15 miles west of Diano,) in the heart of the mountains, and in the great extent of rugged country, south of the very high table land of Piano di Salvagnuola, and still more south, in the valleys of the rivers Carmignano, Calore, (another west of the river of the Vallone Diano,) Pietra, and Cilnio, the earth-wave must have been propagated with much violence, but with frequent and rapid changes of direction, and hence rapid loss of vis vivâ and speedy extinction. Castelluccia, Ottati, Corbeto, Laurino, and some other towns were greatly damaged. But there are vast tracts of uninhabited mountain and valley about here, and little is known of the shock in these, which I was unable to enter, as they were all under snow of considerable depth.

Still further west, however, after the confluence of the above-named rivers which divide the country for above twenty-five miles in a nearly north and south direction (by compass), though in an irregular line, and previous to the approach of this river to the Bosco Persano, before its junction with the Salaris, the long valley of the western Calore arrested almost completely the violence of the shock, so that between it and the Sea at Pæstum little of it was experienced.

Returning to the Valley of Diano, upon a new piece of the military road not yet used, between Atena and La Sala, was a newly erected culvert, of three semicircular arches of 12 feet span, passing a torrent under the road, the piers, about 8 feet to the springing, all built of good squared ashlar, the arches turned in brick, two bricks thick.