about eight o'clock
`` Having retired for the night , at about nine o'clock , I awoke shortly afterwards in the midst of a suffocating heat and completely bathed in perspiration ... . I awoke again about eleven thirty-five , having felt a trembling of the earth ... but again went to sleep , waking at half-past seven . My first observation was of the crater , which I found sufficiently calm , the vapors being chased swiftly under pressure of an east wind . `` At about eight o'clock , when still watching the crater -LRB- M. Arnoux was the only man who saw the beginning of the eruption and lived to tell the tale -RRB- , I noted a small cloud pass out , followed two seconds after by a considerable cloud , whose flight to the Pointe de Carbet -LRB- beyond the city -RRB- _ occupied less than three seconds _ , being at the same time already in our zenith , thus showing that it developed almost as rapidly in height as in length . The vapors were of a violet-gray color and seemingly very dense , for , although endowed with an almost inconceivably powerful ascensive force , they retained to the zenith their rounded summits . Innumerable electric scintillations played through the chaos of vapors , at the same time that the ears were deafened by a frightful fracas . `` I had , at this time , an impression that St. Pierre had been destroyed ... .