Robert Harris - Pompeii

The shock of the blast struck him from behind and knocked him forward. Hot air, like the opening of a furnace door. Then something seemed to pop in his ears and the world became a soundless place of bending trees and whirling leaves. His horse stumbled and almost fell and he clung to its neck as they plunged down the path, both of them riding the crest of the scalding wave and then abruptly it was gone. The trees sprang upright, the debris settled, the air became breathable again. He tried to talk to the horse but he had no voice and when he looked back toward the top of the mountain he saw that it had vanished and in its place a boiling stem of rock and earth was shooting upward.

From Pompeii it looked as if a sturdy brown arm had punched through the peak and was aiming to smash a hole in the roof of the sky— bang, bang: that double crack—and then a hard-edged rumble, unlike any other sound in nature, that came rolling across the plain. Ampliatus ran outside with the magistrates. From the bakery next door and all the way up the street people were emerging to stare at Vesuvius, shielding their eyes, their faces turned toward this new dark sun rising in the north on its thundering plinth of rock. There were a couple of screams but no general panic. It was still too early, the thing was too awesome—too strange and remote—for it to be perceived as an immediate threat.

It will stop at any moment, Ampliatus thought. He willed it to do so. Let it subside now, and the situation will still be controllable. He had the nerve, the force of character; it was all a question of presentation. He could handle even this: “The gods have given us a sign, citizens! Let us heed their instruction! Let us build a great column, in imitation of this celestial inspiration! We live in a favored spot!” But the thing did not stop. Up and up it went. A thousand heads tilted backward as one to follow its trajectory and gradually the isolated screams became more widespread. The pillar, narrow at its base, was broadening as it rose, its apex flattening out across the sky.

Someone shouted that the wind was carrying it their way.

That was the moment at which he knew he would lose them. The mob had a few simple instincts—greed, lust, cruelty—and he could play them like the strings of a harp because he was of the mob and the mob was him. But shrill fear drowned out every other note. Still, he tried. He stepped into the center of the street and held his arms out wide. “Wait!” he shouted. “Cuspius, Brittius—all of you—link hands with me! Set them an example!”

The cowards didn’t even look at him. Holconius broke first, jamming his bony elbows into the press of bodies to force his way down the hill. Brittius followed, and then Cuspius. Popidius turned tail and darted back inside the house. Up ahead, the crowd had become a solid mass as people streamed from the side streets to join it. Its back was to the mountain now, its face was to the sea, its only instinct: flight. Ampliatus had a final glimpse of his wife’s white face in the doorway and then he was engulfed by the stampeding crowd, spun like one of the revolving wooden models they used for practice in the gladiatorial school. He was thrown sideways, winded, and would have disappeared beneath their feet if Massavo had not seen him fall and scooped him up to safety on the step. He saw a mother drop her baby and heard its screams as it was trampled, saw an elderly matron slammed headfirst against the opposite wall then slip, unconscious, out of sight, as the mob swept on regardless. Some screamed. Some sobbed. Most were tight-mouthed, intent on saving their strength for the battle at the bottom of the hill, where they would have to fight their way through the Stabian Gate.

Ampliatus, leaning against the doorjamb, was aware of a wetness on his face and when he dabbed the back of his hand to his nose it came away smeared in blood. He looked above the heads of the crowd toward the mountain but already it had disappeared. A vast black wall of cloud was advancing toward the city, as dark as a storm. But it was not a storm, he realized, and it was not a cloud; it was a thundering waterfall of rock. He looked quickly in the other direction. He still had his gold-and-crimson cruiser moored down in the harbor. They could put to sea, try to head to the villa in Misenum, seek shelter there. But the cram of bodies in the street leading to the gate was beginning to stretch back up the hill. He would never reach the port. And even if he did, the crew would be scrambling to save themselves.

His decision was made for him. And so be it, he thought. This was exactly how it had been seventeen years ago. The cowards had fled, he had stayed, and then they had all come crawling back again! He felt his old energy and confidence returning. Once more the former slave would give his masters a lesson in Roman courage. The sibyl was never wrong. He gave a final, contemptuous glance to the river of panic streaming past him, stepped back, and ordered Massavo to close the door. Close it and bolt it. They would stay, and they would endure.

In Misenum it looked like smoke. Pliny’s sister, Julia, strolling on the terrace with her parasol, picking the last of the summer roses for the dinner table, assumed it must be another of the hillside fires that had plagued the bay all summer. But the height of the cloud, its bulk, and the speed of its ascent were like nothing she had ever seen. She decided she had better wake her brother, who was dozing over his books in the garden below.

Even in the heavy shade of the tree his face was as scarlet as the flowers in her basket. She hesitated to disturb him, because of course he would immediately start to get excited. He reminded her of how their father had been in the days before his death—the same corpulence, the same shortness of breath, the same uncharacteristic irritability. But if she let him sleep he would no doubt be even more furious to have missed the peculiar smoke, so she stroked his hair and whispered, “Brother, wake up. There is something you will want to see.”

He opened his eyes at once. “The water—is it flowing?”

“No. Not the water. It looks like a great fire on the bay, coming from Vesuvius.”

“Vesuvius?” He blinked at her, then shouted to a nearby slave. “My shoes! Quickly!”

“Now, brother, don’t exert yourself too much—”

He didn’t even wait for his shoes. Instead, for the second time that day, he set off barefoot, lumbering across the dry grass toward the terrace. By the time he reached it most of the household slaves were lining the balustrade, looking east across the bay toward what seemed like a gigantic umbrella pine made of smoke growing over the coast. A thick brown trunk, with black-and-white blotches, was rolling miles into the air, sprouting at its crown a clump of feathery branches. These broad leaves seemed in turn to be dissolving along their lower edges, beginning to rain a fine, sand-colored mist back down to earth.

It was an axiom of the admiral’s, one he was fond of repeating, that the more he observed nature, the less prone he was to consider any statement about her to be impossible. But surely this was impossible. Nothing he had read of—and he had read everything—came close to matching this spectacle. Perhaps nature was granting him the privilege of witnessing something never before recorded in history? Those long years of accumulating facts, the prayer with which he had ended the Natural History —“Hail Nature, mother of all creation, and mindful that I alone of the men of Rome have praised thee in all thy manifestations, be gracious toward me”—was it all being rewarded at last? If he had not been so fat he would have fallen to his knees. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you.”