Robert Harris - Pompeii

He rode a little farther along the crowded highway until he came to a high pair of gateposts that he judged must belong to the Villa Calpurnia. He tied his horse to a railing in the courtyard and looked around for any sign of life, but the enormous palace seemed to be deserted. He walked through the open door into the grand atrium, and then along the side of an enclosed garden. He could hear shouts, footsteps running along the marble corridors, and then a slave appeared around a corner pushing a wheelbarrow stacked high with rolls of papyrus. He ignored Attilius’s command to stop and headed through a wide doorway into the brilliant afternoon light, as another slave, also pushing a wheelbarrow—this one empty—hurried through the entrance and into the house. The engineer blocked his path.

“Where’s the senator?”

“He’s in Rome.” The slave was young, terrified, sweating.

“Your mistress?”

“Beside the pool. Please—let me pass.”

Attilius moved aside to let him go and ran out into the sun. Beneath the terrace was the huge pool he had seen from the liburnian on his voyage to Pompeii and all around it were people: dozens of slaves and white-robed scholars hurrying back and forth ferrying armfuls of papyri, stacking them into boxes at the water’s edge, while a group of women stood to one side, staring along the coast toward the distant storm, which looked from here like an immense brown sea fog. The craft offshore from Herculaneum were mere twigs against it. The fishing had stopped. The waves were rising. Attilius could hear them crashing against the shore in quick succession; no sooner had one broken than another came in on top of it. Some of the women were wailing, but the elderly matron in the center of the group, in a dark-blue dress, seemed calm as he approached her. He remembered her—the woman with the necklace of giant pearls.

“Are you the wife of Pedius Cascus?”

She nodded.

“Marcus Attilius. Imperial engineer. I met your husband two nights ago, at the admiral’s villa.”

She looked at him eagerly. “Has Pliny sent you?”

“No. I came to beg a favor. To ask for a boat.”

Her face fell. “Do you think if I had a boat I would be standing here? My husband took it yesterday to Rome.”

Attilius looked around the vast palace, at its statues and gardens, at the art treasures and books being piled up on the lawns. He turned to go.

“Wait!” She called after him. “You must help us.”

“There’s nothing I can do. You’ll have to take your chance on the road with the rest.”

“I’m not afraid for myself. But the library—we must rescue the library. There are too many books to move by road.”

“My concern is for people, not books.”

“People perish. Books are immortal.”

“Then if books are immortal, they will survive without my assistance.”

He began climbing the path back up toward the house.

“Wait!” She gathered her skirts and ran after him. “Where are you going?”

“To find a boat.”

“Pliny has boats. Pliny has the greatest fleet in the world at his command.”

“Pliny is on the other side of the bay.”

“Look across the sea! An entire mountain is threatening to descend on us! Do you think one man in one little boat can do anything? We need a fleet. Come with me!”

He would say this for her: she had the willpower of any man. He followed her around the pillared walkway surrounding the pool, up a flight of steps, and into a library. Most of the compartments had been stripped bare. A couple of slaves were loading what remained into a wheelbarrow. Marble heads of ancient philosophers looked down, dumbstruck at what was happening.

“This was where we kept the volumes that my ancestors brought back from Greece. One hundred twenty plays by Sophocles alone. All the works of Aristotle, some in his own hand. They are irreplaceable. We have never allowed them to be copied.” She gripped his arm. “Men are born and die by the thousand every hour. What do we matter? These great works are all that will be left of us. Pliny will understand.” She sat at the small table, took up a pen, and dipped it in an ornate brass inkstand. A red candle flickered beside her. “Take him this letter. He knows this library. Tell him Rectina pleads with him for rescue.”

Behind her, across the terrace, Attilius could see the ominous darkness moving steadily around the bay, like the shadow on a sundial. He had thought it might diminish but if anything the force of it was intensifying. She was right. It would take big ships—warships—to make any impression against an enemy on this scale. She rolled the letter and sealed it with the dripping candle, pressing her ring into the soft wax. “You have a horse?”

“I’d go faster with a fresh one.”

“You’ll have it.” She called to one of the slaves. “Take Marcus Attilius to the stables and saddle the swiftest horse we have.” She gave him the letter and, as he took it, clasped her dry and bony fingers around his wrist. “Don’t fail me, engineer.”

He pulled his hand free and ran after the slave.

HORA NONA

[15:32 hours]

The effect of the sudden release of huge volumes of magma can

alter the geometry of the plumbing system, destabilize the shallow

reservoir, and induce structural collapse. Such a situation frequently increases the eruption intensity, inducing contact between phreatic

fluids and magma, as well as explosive decompression of the

hydrothermal system associated with the shallow reservoir.

— ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VOLCANOES

It took Attilius just under two hours of hard riding to reach Misenum. The road wound along the coastline, sometimes running directly beside the water’s edge, sometimes climbing higher inland, past the immense villas of the Roman elite. All the way along it he passed small groups of spectators gathered at the edge of the highway to watch the distant phenomenon. He mostly had his back to the mountain, but when he rounded the northern edge of the bay and began to descend toward Neapolis, he could see it again, away to his left—a thing of extraordinary beauty now. A delicate veil of white mist had draped itself around the central column, rising for mile after mile in a perfect translucent cylinder, reaching up to brush the lower edge of the mushroom-shaped cloud that was toppling over the bay.

There was no sense of panic in Neapolis, a sleepy place at the best of times. He had far outpaced the weary, laden refugees emerging from beneath the hail of rock and no word of the catastrophe enveloping Pompeii had yet reached the city. The Greek-style temples and theaters facing out to sea gleamed white in the afternoon sun. Tourists strolled in the gardens. In the hills behind the town he could see the redbrick arcade of the Aqua Augusta where she ran above the surface. He wondered if the water was flowing yet but he didn’t dare stop to find out. In truth, he didn’t care. What had earlier seemed the most vital matter in the world had dwindled in importance to nothing. What were Exomnius and Corax now but dust? Not even dust; barely even a memory. He wondered what had happened to the other men. But the image he could not rid himself of was Corelia—the way she had swept back her hair as she mounted her horse, and the way she had dwindled into the distance, following the road he had set for her—to the fate that he, and not destiny, had decreed for her.

He passed through Neapolis and out into the open country again, into the immense road tunnel that Agrippa had carved beneath the promontory of Pausilypon—in which the torches of the highway slaves, as Seneca had observed, did not so much pierce the darkness as reveal it—past the immense concrete grain wharves of the Puteoli harbor—another of Agrippa’s projects—past the outskirts of Cumae—where the sibyl was said to hang in her bottle and wish for death—past the vast oyster beds of Lake Avernus, past the great terraced baths of Baiae, past the drunks on the beaches and the souvenir shops with their brightly painted glassware, the children flying kites, the fishermen repairing their flaxen nets on the quaysides, the men playing bones in the shade of the oleanders, past the century of marines in full kit running at double time down to the naval base—past all the teeming life of the Roman superpower, while on the opposite side of the bay Vesuvius emitted a second, rolling boom, turning the fountain of rock from gray to black and pushing it even higher.