Ashes were already falling, not as yet very thickly. I looked round: a dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood. ‘Let us leave the road while we can still see, ‘I said, ‘or we shall be knocked down and trampled underfoot in the dark by the crowd behind.’ We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room.

You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.

– Pliny the Younger

Letters of Pliny, Book VI, Letter 20, to Tacitus. Description of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius which destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD. The 18-year-old Pliny the Younger observed the tragedy, which claimed the life of his uncle Pliny the Elder, from a distance of 13 miles away at Misenum where the Younger was staying.