Robert Harris - Pompeii

Suddenly the rudder jumped and moved so freely he thought it must have snapped and Torquatus swung it hard, aiming them toward the beach. They had broken clear of the clinging pumice and were into the rolling waves, the force of the sea and the wind propelling them directly at the shore. He saw the crowd of people on the beach, all trying to load their possessions into the boats, turn to look at them in astonishment, saw them break and scatter as the liburnian bore down upon them. Torquatus cried out, “Brace yourselves!” and an instant later the hull scraped rock and Attilius went flying down onto the main deck, his landing cushioned by the foot-thick mattress of stone.

He lay there for a moment, winded, his cheek pressed to the warm, dry pumice, as the ship rolled beneath him. He heard the shouts of the sailors coming up from belowdecks, and the splashes as they jumped into the surf. He raised himself and saw the sail being lowered, the anchor flung over the side. Men with ropes were running up the beach, trying to find places to secure the ship. It was twilight—not the twilight thrown out by the eruption, which they seemed to have sailed straight through, but the natural dusk of early evening. The shower of stones was light and intermittent and the noise as they scattered over the deck and plopped into the sea was lost in the boom of the surf and the roar of the wind. Pliny had emerged from the trapdoor and was stepping carefully through the pumice, supported by Alexion—a solid and dignified figure in the midst of the panic all around him. If he felt any fear he did not show it and as Attilius approached he raised his arm almost cheerfully.

“Well, this is a piece of good fortune, engineer. Do you see where we are? I know this place well. This is Stabiae—a most pleasant town in which to spend an evening. Torquatus!” He beckoned to the captain. “I suggest we stay here for the night.”

Torquatus regarded him with incredulity. “We have no choice about it, admiral. No ship can be launched against this wind. The question is: how soon will it carry that wall of rock upon us?”

“Perhaps it won’t,” said Pliny. He gazed across the surf at the lights of the little town, rising into the low hillside. It was separated from the beach by the coastal road that ran all around the bay. The highway was clogged with the same weary traffic of refugees that Attilius had encountered earlier at Herculaneum. On the shore itself, perhaps a hundred people had congregated with their possessions, hoping to escape by sea, but unable to do more than gaze hopelessly at the crashing waves. One fat and elderly man stood apart, surrounded by his household, occasionally throwing up his hands in lamentation, and Attilius felt a stir of recognition. Pliny had noticed him, too. “That’s my friend, Pomponianus. The poor old fool,” he said, sadly. “A nervous fellow at the best of times. He’ll need our comfort. We must wear our bravest faces. Assist me to the shore.”

Attilius jumped down into the sea, followed by Torquatus. The water was up to their waists at one moment, at the next it was swirling around their necks. It was no easy task to take off a man of the admiral’s weight and condition. With Alexion’s help Pliny finally got down onto his backside and shuffled forward and as they took his arms he slipped into the water. They managed to keep his head above the surface, and then, in an impressive show of self-control, he shrugged off their support and waded ashore unaided.

“A stubborn old fool,” said Torquatus, as they watched him march up the beach and embrace Pomponianus. “A magnificent, courageous, stubborn old fool. He’s almost killed us twice and I swear he’ll try again before he’s finished.”

Attilius glanced along the coast toward Vesuvius, but he couldn’t see much in the gathering darkness except for the luminous white lines of the waves running in to batter the coast, and beyond them the inky black of the falling rock. Another line of red lightning split the sky. He said, “How far are we from Pompeii?”

“Three miles,” answered Torquatus. “Perhaps less. It looks like they’re taking the worst of it, poor wretches. This wind—the men had better seek some shelter.”

He began wading toward the shore, leaving Attilius alone.

If Stabiae was three miles downwind of Pompeii, and Vesuvius lay five miles to the other side of the city, then this monstrous cloud must be eight miles long. Eight miles long, and—what?—at least five miles wide, given how far it reached out into the sea. Unless Corelia had fled very early, she would have had no chance of escape.

He stood there for a while, buffeted by the sea, until at length he heard the admiral calling his name. Helplessly he turned and made his way through the restless shallows, up onto the beach to join the rest.

Pomponianus had a villa on the seashore only a short walk along the road, and Pliny was suggesting they should all return to it. Attilius could hear them arguing as he approached. Pomponianus, panicky, was objecting in his high voice that if they left the beach they would lose their chance of a place in a boat. But Pliny waved that away. “No sense in waiting here,” he said. His voice was urgent. “Besides, you can always sail with us, when the wind and sea are more favorable. Come, Livia—take my arm.” And with Pomponianus’s wife on one side and Alexion on the other, and with the household slaves strung out behind them—lugging marble busts, carpets, chests, and candelabra—he led them up onto the road.

He was hurrying as fast as he could, his cheeks puffed out, and Attilius thought, He knows—he knows from his observations what is about to happen. Sure enough they had just reached the gates of the villa when it came on them again like a summer storm—first a few heavy drops, as a warning, and then the air exploded over the myrtle bushes and the cobbled courtyard. Attilius could feel someone’s body pressing into his from behind; he pushed into the man in front and together they tumbled through the door and into the darkened, deserted villa. People were wailing, knocking blindly into the furniture. He heard a woman’s scream and a crash. The disembodied face of a slave appeared, illuminated from below by an oil lamp, and then the face vanished and he heard the familiar wumph as a torch was lit. They huddled in the comfort of the light, masters and slaves alike, as the pumice clattered onto the terra-cotta roof of the villa and smashed into the ornamental gardens outside. Someone went off with the oil lamp to fetch more torches and some candles, and the slaves went on lighting them long after there was sufficient light, as if somehow the brighter the scene, the more safe they would be. The crowded hall soon had an almost festive feel to it, and that was when Pliny, with his arm draped round the quivering shoulders of Pomponianus, declared that he would like to eat.

The admiral had no belief in an afterlife: “Neither body nor mind has any more sensation after death than it had before birth.” Nevertheless, he put on a display of bravery over the next few hours that none who survived the evening would afterward forget. He

had long ago resolved that when death came for him he would endeavor to meet it in the spirit of Marcus Sergius, whom he had crowned in

the Natural History as the most courageous man who had ever lived—wounded twenty-three times in the course of his campaigns, left crippled, twice captured by Hannibal and held in chains every day for twenty months; Sergius had ridden into his final battle with a right hand made of iron, a substitute for the one he had lost. He was not as successful as Scipio or Caesar, but what did that matter? “All other victors truly have conquered men,” Pliny had written, “but Sergius vanquished fortune also.”