In a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the eastern spurs of the Karpathians, a man stood one winter night watching and listening, as though he waited for some beast of the woods to come within the range of his vision, and, later, of his rifle. But the game for whose presence he kept so keen an outlook was none that figured in the sportsman’s calendar as lawful and proper for the chase; Ulrich yon Gradwitz patrolled the dark forest in quest of a human enemy. The forest lands of Gradwitz were of wide extent and well stocked with game; the narrow strip of precipitous woodland that lay on its outskirt was not remarkable for the game it harboured or the shooting it "afforded, but it was the most jealously guarded of all its owner’s territorial possessions. A famous law suit, in the days of his grandfather, had wrested it from the illegal possession of a neighbouring family of petty landowners; the dispossessed party had never acquiesced in the judgment of the Courts, and a long series of poaching affrays and similar scandals had embittered the relationships between the families for three generations. The neighbour feud had grown into a personal one since Ulrich had come to be head of his family; if there was a man in the world whom he detested and wished ill to it was Georg Znaeym, the inheritor of the quarrel and the tireless game-snatcher and raider of the disputed border-forest. The feud might, perhaps, have died down or been compromised if the personal ill-will of the two men had not stood in the way. As boys they had thirsted for one another’s blood, as men each prayed that misfortune might fall on the other, and this windscourged winter night Ulrich had banded together his foresters to watch the dark forest, not in quest of fourfooted quarry, but to keep a look-out for the prowling thieves whom he suspected of being afoot from across the land boundary. The roebuck, which usually kept in the sheltered hollows during a storm-wind, were running like driven things tonight, and there was movement and unrest among the creatures that were wont to sleep through the dark hours. Assuredly there was a disturbing element in the forest, and Ulrich could guess the quarter from whence it came. The two enemies stood glaring at one another for a long silent moment. Each had a rifle in his hand, each had hate in his heart and murder uppermost in his mind. The chance had come to give full play to the passions of a lifetime. But a man who has been brought up under the code of a restraining eivilisation cannot easily nerve himself to shoot down his neighbour in cold blood and without word spoken, except for an offence against his hearth and honour. And before the moment of hesitation had given way to action a deed of Nature’s own violence overwhelmed them both. A fierce shriek of the storm had been answered by a splitting crash over their heads, and ere they could leap aside a mass of falling beech tree had thundered down on them. Ulrich yon Gradwitz found himself stretched on the ground, one arm numb beneath him and the other held almost as helplessly in a tight tangle of forked branches, while both legs were pinned beneath the fallen mass. His heavy shooting-boots had saved his feet from being crushed to pieces, but if his fractures were not as serious as they might have been, at least it was evident that he could not move from his present position till some one came to release him. The descending twig had slashed the skin of his face, and he had to wink away some drops of blood from his eyelashes before he could take in a general view of the disaster. At his side, so near that under ordinary circumstances he could almost have touched him, lay Georg Znaeym, alive and struggling, but obviously as helplessly pinioned down as himself. All round them lay a thick-strewn wreckage of splintered branches and broken twigs. Ulrich suspected somebody had intruded into the woodland because
A. some animals made some unusual movement.
B. he was informed of the intrusion in advance.
C. his foresters detected the trace of the intruder.
D. there was suffocating quietness in the air.
Later the Greeks moved east from Cumae to Neapolis, the New City, a little farther along the coast where modern Naples now stands. We have a very good idea what life in this sun-splashed land was like during the Roman era because of the recovered splendor of Pompeii and Herculaneum. But as the well-trod earth of Campania continues to yield ancient secrets, Mastrolorenzo and Petrone, with their colleague Lucia Pappalardo, have put together a rich view of an earlier time and what may have been humankind’s first encounter with the primal force of Vesuvius. Almost all has come to light by chance. In May 2001, for example, construction workers began digging the foundation for a supermarket next to a desolate, weed-strewn intersection just outside the town of Nola. An archaeologist working for the province of Naples noticed several trances of burned wood a few feet below the surface, an indication of earlier human habitation. At 19 feet below, relicts of a perfectly preserved Early Bronze Age village began to emerge. Over the next several months, the excavation unearthed three large prehistoric dwellings: horseshoe shaped huts with clearly demarked entrances, living areas, and the equivalent of kitchens. Researchers found dozens of pots, pottery plates, and crude hourglass-shaped canisters that still contained fossilized traces of almonds, flour, grain, acorns, olive-pits, even mushrooms. Simple partitions separated the rooms; one hut had what appeared to be a loft. The tracks of goats, sheep, cattle, and pigs, as well as their human masters, crisscrossed the yard outside. The skeletons of nine pregnant goats lay in an enclosed area that included an animal pen. If a skeleton can be said to cower, the bones of an apparently terrified dog huddled under the eaves of one roof. What preserved this prehistoric village, what formed a perfect impression of its quotidian contents right down to leaves in the thatch roofs and cereal grains in the kitchen containers, was the fallout and surge and mud from the Avellino eruption of Vesuvius. Claude Albore Livadie, a French archaeologist who published the initial report on the Nola discovery, dubbed it "a first Pompeii". During May and June 2001, provincial archaeological authorities oversaw excavation of the site Mastrolorenzo hurried out to Nola, about 18 miles east of Naples. He and Pappalardo took samples of the ash and volcanic deposits, which contained chemical clues to the magnitude of the eruption. But then the scientific story veered off into the familiar opera buffa of Italian archaeology. The owner of the site agitated for construction of the supermarket to resume or to be compensated for the delay—not an unusual dilemma in a country where the backhoes and bulldozers of a modern economy clang against the ubiquitous remains of ancient civilizations. Government archaeologists hastily excavated the site and removed the objects. As it turns out, the supermarket was never built, and all that remains of a site that miraculously captured one of civilization’s earliest encounters with volcanic destruction is a hole in the ground on a vacant, weed-choked lot, the foundation walls of the huts barely visible. A small, weathered sign proclaiming the "Pompeii of Prehistory" hangs limply from a padlocked gate. Despite the loss of Nola as well as some other archaeological sites, Mastrolorenzo, Petrone, Pappalardo, and American volcanologist Michael Sheridan triggered world wide fascination when they summarized these findings in the spring of 2006 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). But their research went beyond mere archaeological documentation. The Avellino event, they wrote, "caused a social-demographic collapse and abandonment of the entire area for centuries. " The new findings, along with computer models, show that an Avellino-size eruption would unleash a concentric wave of destruction that could devastate Naples and much of its surroundings. In the world before Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami, these warnings might have sounded as remote and transitory as those prehistoric footsteps. Not anymore. According to the relicts, we can infer that domestic animal died because
A. they were horrified.
B. they were suffocated.
C. they were killed by their masters.
D. they had no food.