Twenty-five Days in a Ruin.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 4, Issue 47, 18 June 1915, Page 8

Twenty-five Days in a Ruin.

THE MARVELLOUS POWERS OF ill :UA.N i'JMH lUI\(JK WHEN THE BODY LIVES UPON 1 ISbJLF. Of tite many .strange and terrible stories that corny to us from the great earthquake in Italy, 000 at leatt has a nappy ending, lor a man has co.iu back to the sunlight to tell us of 25 clays passed in fasting and gross darkness. His name is Michael Caiolo, and liis home wits at Paterno, wiiicii was overthrown by the heaving earth. He felt the lirst shocks, and, reaL»,ii«; what was coming, ran into a stable. His house collapsed and fell on the stable, making him a prisoner in tne ruins. H»» was in utter darkness and without food, but by the happiest chance water from a burst pipe trickled slowiy through a crack in tne wail, and he was able to drink. Days and nights passed without relief, he could drink and sleep, but little movement was possible; and that was really his salvation, though he did not know it. For the fact is that if wo do not exhaust ourselves by muscular effort, if we e.in rest in a constant temperature nearly equal to the heat of our blood, we can endure privation for an astonishingly iOng time. Shipwrecked mariners exposed to changing temperatures and to the exhaustion of labour in their boats cannot equal his feat; neither can those who have to walk when fasting. When we are quiet, in a favourable, unchanging temperature, an almost incredible thing happens. The bodj blowlv lives upon itself, and so preaerTee our life!

The bodies of human beings and animals contain fat, and during starTation the tissues feed upon it. The fats nourish the blood, the muscles, the brain, and the spinal cord. The sufferer becomes thin and thinner. As the fat lying on the surface diminishes, the skin becomes dryan d harsh: the brain and heart slowly lose weight; great hunger is felt for the first day or two, then a feeling of drowsiness comes on, and the man, if left, would slowly sleep away to painless death. Hut in favourable conditions the time taken might be forty days.

Tlie survival of Caiolo is another evidence of the marvellous powers of endurance with which we are endowed. What fasts primitive men must have borne in the hard days of winter ages ago! Who knows that our power to endure may not have come down to us from those far-back days when our ancestors were snowed up in thei* cave dwellings, with nothing to eat, and nothing but snow to moisten their cracked and j■arching lips?