Robert Harris - Pompeii

For a short while longer they managed to plow on, but the pace of the oars was weakening, defeated not by the wind or the waves but by the clogging weight of pumice on the water. It deepened as they neared the coast, two or three feet thick—a broad expanse of rustling dry surf. The blades of the oars flailed helplessly across it, unable to bring any pressure to bear, and the ship began to drift with the wind toward the waterfall of rock. The Villa Calpurnia was tantalizingly close. Attilius recognized the spot where he had stood with Rectina. He could see figures running along the shore, the piles of books, the fluttering white robes of the Epicurean philosophers.

Pliny had stopped dictating and, with Attilius’s assistance, had pulled himself up onto his feet. All around the timber was creaking as the pressure of the pumice squeezed the hull. The engineer felt him sag slightly as, for the first time, he seemed to appreciate that they were defeated. He stretched out his hand toward the shore. “Rectina,” he murmured.

The rest of the fleet was beginning to scatter, the V formation disintegrating as the ships battled to save themselves. And then it was dusk again and the familiar thunder of pumice hammering drowned out every other sound. Torquatus shouted, “We’ve lost control of the ship! Everybody—belowdecks. Engineer—help me lift him down from here.”

“My records!” protested Pliny.

“Alexion has your records, admiral.” Attilius had him by one arm and the captain by the other. He was immensely heavy. He stumbled on the last step and nearly fell full-length but they managed to retrieve him and lugged him along the deck toward the open trapdoor that led down to the rowing stations as the air turned to rock. “Make way for the admiral!” panted Torquatus and then they almost threw him down the ladder. Alexion went next with the precious papyri, treading on the admiral’s shoulders, then Attilius jumped down in a shower of pumice, and finally Torquatus, slamming the trap behind them.

VESPERA

[20:02 hours]

During [the first] phase the vent radius was probably of the order

of 100 metres. As the eruption continued, inevitable widening of

the vent permitted still higher mass eruption rates. By the evening

of the 24 th, the column height had increased. Progressively deeper

levels within the magma chamber were tapped, until after about

seven hours the more mafic grey pumice was reached. This was

ejected at about 1.5 million tonnes per second, and carried by

convection to maximum heights of around 33 kilometres.

— VOLCANOES: A PLANETARY PERSPECTIVE

In the stifling heat and the near darkness beneath the Minerva’ s decks they crouched and listened to the drumming of the stones above them. The air was rank with the sweat and breath of two hundred sailors. Occasionally, a foreign voice would cry out in some unrecognizable tongue only to be silenced by a harsh shout from one of the officers. A man near Attilius moaned repeatedly that it was the end of the world—and that, indeed, was what it felt like to the engineer. Nature had reversed herself so that they were drowning beneath rock in the middle of the sea, drifting in the depths of night during the bright hours of the day. The ship was rocking violently but none of the oars was moving. There was no purpose to any activity, since they had no idea of the direction in which they were pointing. There was nothing to do but endure, each man huddled in his own thoughts.

How long this went on, Attilius could not calculate. Perhaps one hour; perhaps two. He wasn’t even sure where he was belowdecks. He knew that he was clinging to a narrow wooden gantry that seemed to run the length of the ship, with the double banks of sailors crammed on benches on either side. He could hear Pliny wheezing somewhere close, Alexion snuffling like a child. Torquatus was entirely silent. The incessant hammering of the pumice, sharp to begin with as it rattled on the timber of the deck, gradually became more muffled, as pumice fell on pumice, sealing them off from the world. And that, for him, was the worst thing—the sense of this mass slowly pressing down on them, burying them alive. As time passed he began to wonder how long the joists of the deck would hold, or whether the sheer weight of what was above them would push them beneath the waves. He tried to console himself with the thought that pumice was light: the engineers in Rome, when they were constructing a great dome, sometimes mixed it into the cement in place of rock and fragments of brick. Nevertheless he gradually became aware that the ship was starting to list and very soon after that a cry of panic went up from some of the sailors to his right that water was pouring through the oar-holes.

Torquatus shouted at them roughly to be quiet, then called down the gantry to Pliny that he needed to take a party of men abovedecks to try to shovel off the rock fall.

“Do what you have to do, captain,” replied the admiral. His voice was calm. “This is Pliny!” he suddenly bellowed above the roar of the storm. “I expect every man to bear himself like a Roman soldier! And when we return to Misenum, you will all be rewarded, I promise you!”

There was some jeering from the darkness.

“If we return, more like!”

“It was you who got us into the mess!”

“Silence!” yelled Torquatus. “Engineer, will you help me?” He had mounted the short ladder to the trapdoor and was trying to push it open but the weight of the pumice made it hard to lift. Attilius groped his way along the gantry and joined him on the ladder, holding on to it with one hand, heaving with the other at the wooden panel above his head. Together they raised it slowly, releasing a cascade of debris that bounced off their heads and clattered onto the timbers below. “I need twenty men!” ordered Torquatus. “You five banks of oars—follow me.”

Attilius climbed out after him into the whirl of flying pumice. There was a strange, almost brownish light, as in a sandstorm, and as he straightened Torquatus grabbed his arm and pointed. It took Attilius a moment to see what he meant, but then he glimpsed it too—a row of winking yellow lights showing faintly through the murk. Pompeii, he thought— Corelia!

“We’ve drifted beneath the worst of it and come in close to the coast!” shouted the captain. “The gods alone know where! We’ll try to run her aground! Help me at the helm!” He turned and pushed the nearest of the oarsmen back toward the trapdoor. “Get back below and tell the others to row—to row for their lives! The rest of you—hoist the sail!”

He ran along the side of the ship toward the stern and Attilius followed, his head lowered, his feet sinking into the heavy blanket of white pumice that covered the deck like snow. They were so low in the water he felt he could almost have stepped down onto the carpet of rock and walked ashore. He clambered up onto the poop deck and with Torquatus he seized the great oar that steered the liburnian. But even with two men swinging on it, the blade wouldn’t move against the floating mass.

Dimly, he could see the shape of the sail beginning to rise before them. He heard the crack as it started to fill, and at the same time there was a ripple of movement along the banks of oars. The helm shuddered slightly beneath his hands. Torquatus pushed and he heaved, his feet scrabbling for a purchase in the loose stone, and slowly he felt the wooden shaft begin to move. For a while the liburnian seemed to list, motionless, and then a gust of wind propelled them forward. He heard the drum beating again below, the oars settling into a steady rhythm, and from the gloom ahead the shape of the coast began to emerge—a breakwater, a sandy beach, a row of villas with torches lit along the terraces, people moving at the edge of the sea, where waves were pounding the shore, lifting the boats in the shallows and flinging them back on land. Whatever place this was, he realized with disappointment, it was not Pompeii.