Robert Harris - Pompeii

He hoisted the folds of his toga and began stepping gingerly across the surface, his feet sinking deep into the mud, which then made a delightful sucking noise each time he lifted them. He heard Gaius shout behind him, “Be careful, uncle!” but he shook his head, laughing. He kept away from the tracks the others had made: it was more enjoyable to rupture the crust of mud where it was still fresh and just beginning to harden in the warm air. The others followed at a respectful distance.

What an extraordinary construction it was, this underground vault, with its pillars each ten times higher than a man! What imagination had first envisioned it, what will and strength had driven it through to construction—and all to store water that had already been carried for sixty miles! Pliny had never had any objection to deifying emperors. “God is man helping man,” that was his philosophy. The Divine Augustus deserved his place in the pantheon simply for commissioning the Campanian aqueduct and the Piscina Mirabilis.

By the time he reached the center of the reservoir he was breathless with the effort of repeatedly hoisting his feet out of the clinging sediment. He propped himself against a pillar as Gaius came up beside him. But he was glad that he had made the effort. The water-slave had been wise to send for him. This was something to see, right enough: a mystery of nature had become also a mystery of man.

The object in the mud was an amphora used for storing quicklime. It was wedged almost upright, the bottom part buried in the soft bed of the reservoir. A long, thin rope had been attached to its handles and this lay in a tangle around it. The lid, which had been sealed with wax, had been prised off. Scattered, gleaming in the mud, were perhaps a hundred small silver coins.

“Nothing has been removed, admiral,” said Dromo anxiously. “I told them to leave it exactly as they found it.”

Pliny blew out his cheeks. “How much is in there, Gaius, would you say?”

His nephew buried both hands into the amphora, cupped them, and showed them to the admiral. They brimmed with silver denarii. “A fortune, uncle.”

“And an illegal one, we may be sure. It corrupts the honest mud.” Neither the earthenware vessel nor the rope had much of a coating of sediment, which meant, thought Pliny, that it could not have lain on the reservoir floor for long—a month at most. He glanced up toward the vaulted ceiling. “Someone must have rowed out,” he said, “and lowered it over the side.”

“And then let go of the rope?” Gaius looked at him in wonder. “But who would have done such a thing? How could he have hoped to retrieve it? No diver could swim down this deep!”

“True.” Pliny dipped his own hand into the coins and examined them in his plump palm, stroking them apart with his thumb. Vespasian’s familiar scowling profile decorated one side, the sacred implements of the augur occupied the other. The inscription round the edge—IMP CAES VESP AVG COS III—showed that they had been minted during the emperor’s third consulship, eight years earlier. “Then we must assume that their owner didn’t plan to retrieve them by diving, Gaius, but by draining the reservoir. And the only man with the authority to empty the piscina whenever he desired was our missing aquarius, Exomnius.”

HORA QUARTA

[10:37 hours]

Average magma ascent rates obtained in recent studies suggest that

magma in the chamber beneath Vesuvius may have started rising

at a velocity of > 0.2 metres per second into the conduit of the

volcano some four hours before the eruption—that is, at

approximately 9 A.M . on the morning of 24 August.

BURKHARD MÜLLER-ULLRICH (EDITOR)

DYNAMICS OF VOLCANISM

The quattuorviri—the Board of Four: the elected magistrates of Pompeii—were meeting in emergency session in the drawing room of Lucius Popidius. The slaves had carried in a chair for each of them as well as a small table, around which they sat, mostly silent, arms folded, waiting. Ampliatus, out of deference to the fact that he was not a magistrate, reclined on a couch in the corner, eating a fig, watching them. Through the open door he could see the swimming pool and its silent fountain, and also, in a corner of the tiled garden, a cat playing with a little bird. This ritual of extended death intrigued him. The Egyptians held the cat to be a sacred animal: of all creatures the nearest in intelligence to man. And in the whole of nature, only cats and men—that he could think of—derived an obvious pleasure from cruelty. Did that mean that cruelty and intelligence were inevitably entwined? Interesting.

He ate another fig. The noise of his slurping made Popidius wince. “I must say, you seem supremely confident, Ampliatus.” There was an edge of irritation in his voice.

“I am supremely confident. You should relax.”

“That’s easy enough for you to say. Your name is not on fifty notices spread around the city assuring everyone that the water will be flowing again by midday.”

“Public responsibility—the price of elected office, my dear Popidius.” He clicked his juicy fingers and a slave carried over a small silver bowl. He dunked his hands and dried them on the slave’s tunic. “Have faith in Roman engineering, your honors. All will be well.”

It was four hours since Pompeii had woken to another hot and cloudless day and to the discovery of the failure of its water supply. Ampliatus’s instinct for what would happen next had proved correct. Coming on the morning after most of the town had turned out to sacrifice to Vulcan, it was hard, even for the least superstitious, not to see this as further evidence of the god’s displeasure. Nervous groups had started forming on the street corners soon after dawn. Placards, signed by L. Popidius Secundus, posted in the forum and on the larger fountains, announced that repairs were being carried out on the aqueduct and that the supply would resume by the seventh hour. But it was not much reassurance for those who remembered the terrible earthquake of seventeen years before—the water had failed on that occasion, too—and all morning there had been uneasiness across the town. Some shops had failed to open. A few people had left, with their possessions piled on carts, loudly proclaiming that Vulcan was about to destroy Pompeii for a second time. And now word had got out that the quattuorviri were meeting at the house of Popidius. A crowd had gathered in the street outside. Occasionally, in the comfortable drawing room, the noise of the mob could be heard: a growl, like the sound of the beasts in their cages in the tunnels of the amphitheater, immediately before they were let loose to fight the gladiators.

Brittius shivered. “I told you we should never have agreed to help that engineer.”

“That’s right,” agreed Cuspius. “I said so right at the start. Now look where it’s got us.”

You can learn so much from a man’s face, thought Ampliatus. How much he indulged himself in food and drink, what manner of work he did, his pride, his cowardice, his strength. Popidius, now: he was handsome and weak; Cuspius, like his father, brave, brutal, stupid; Brittius sagged with self-indulgence; Holconius vinegary-sharp and shrewd—too many anchovies and too much garum in that diet.

“Balls,” said Ampliatus amiably. “Think about it. If we hadn’t helped him, he would simply have gone to Nola for assistance and we would still have lost our water, only a day later—and how would that have looked when Rome got to hear of it? Besides, this way we know where he is. He’s in our power.”

The others did not notice, but old Holconius turned round at once. “And why is it so important that we know where he is?”