Robert Harris: Pompeii

“To vanquish fortune”—that was what a man should strive to do. Accordingly, as the slaves prepared his dinner, he told an astonished Pomponianus that he would first like to take a bath and he waddled off, escorted by Alexion, to soak in a cold tub. He removed his filthy clothes and clambered into the clear water, submerging his head completely into a silent world. Surfacing, he announced that he wished to dictate a few more observations—like the engineer, he reckoned the dimensions of the manifestation at roughly eight miles by six—then allowed himself to be patted dry by one of Pomponianus’s body slaves, anointed in saffron oil, and dressed in one of his friend’s clean togas.

Five of them sat down to dinner—Pliny, Pomponianus, Livia, Torquatus, and Attilius. It was not an ideal number from the point of etiquette, and the din of the pumice on the roof made conversation difficult. Still, at least it meant that he had a couch to himself and space to stretch out. The table and the couches had been carried in from the dining room and set up in the sparkling hall. And if the food was not up to much—the fires were out and the best the kitchens could come up with were cold cuts of meat, fowl, and fish—then Pomponianus, at Pliny’s gentle prompting, had made up for it with the wine. He produced a Falernian, two hundred years old, a vintage from the consulship of Lucius Opimius. It was his final jar (“Not much point in hanging onto it now,” he observed gloomily).

The liquid in the candlelight was the color of rough honey, and after it was decanted but before it was mixed with a younger wine—for it was too bitter to be drunk undiluted—Pliny took it from the slave and inhaled it, catching in its musty aroma the whiff of the old republic: of men of the stamp of Cato and Sergius; of a city fighting to become an empire; of the dust of the Campus Martius; of trial by iron and fire.

The admiral did most of the talking and he tried to keep it light, avoiding all mention, for example, of Rectina and the precious library of the Villa Calpurnia, or the fate of the fleet, which he supposed must be broken up by now and scattered all along the coast. (That alone could be enough to force his suicide, he realized: he had put to sea without waiting for imperial authority; Titus might not be forgiving.) Instead he chose to talk about the wine. He knew a lot about wine. Julia called him “a wine bore.” But what did he care? To bore was the privilege of age and rank. If it had not been for wine his heart would have packed it in years ago.

“The records tell us that the summer in the consulship of Opimius was very much like this one. Long hot days filled with endless sunshine—‘ripe,’ as the vintners call it.” He swirled the wine in his glass and sniffed it. “Who knows? Perhaps, two centuries from now, men will be drinking the vintage from this year of ours, and wondering what we were like. Our skill. Our courage.” The thunder of the barrage seemed to be increasing. Somewhere wood splintered. There was a crash of breaking tiles. Pliny looked around the table at his fellow diners—at Pomponianus, who was wincing at the roof and clinging to the hand of his wife; at Livia, who managed to give him a small, tight smile (she always had been twice the man her husband was); at Torquatus, who was frowning at the floor; and finally at the engineer, who had not said a word throughout the meal. He felt warmly toward the aquarius—a man imbued with curiosity, after his own heart, and who had sailed in search of knowledge.

“Let us drink a toast,” he suggested, “to the genius of Roman engineering—to the Aqua Augusta, which gave us warning of what was to happen, if only we had had the wit to heed it!” He raised his glass toward Attilius. “The Aqua Augusta!”

“The Aqua Augusta!”

They drank, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. And it was a good wine, thought the admiral, smacking his lips. A perfect blend of the old and the young. Like himself and the engineer. And if it proved to be his last? Well then: it was an appropriate wine to end on.

When he announced that he was going to bed, he could see that they assumed he must be joking. But no, he assured them, he was serious. He had trained himself to fall asleep at will—even upright, in a saddle, in a freezing German forest. This? This was nothing! “Your arm, engineer, if you will be so kind.” He wished them all good night.

Attilius held a torch aloft in one hand and with the other he supported the admiral. Together they went out into the central courtyard. Pliny had stayed here often over the years. It was a favorite spot of his: the dappled light on the pink stone, the smell of the flowers, the cooing from the dovecote set in the wall above the veranda. But now the garden was in pitch darkness, trembling with the roar of falling stone. Pumice was strewn across the covered walkway and the clouds of dust from the dry and brittle rock set off his wheezing. He stopped outside the door of his usual room and waited for Attilius to clear a space so that he could pull open the door. He wondered what had happened to the birds. Had they flown away just before the manifestation started, thus offering a portent, if an augur had been on hand to divine it? Or were they out there somewhere in the black night, battered and huddled? “Are you frightened, Marcus Attilius?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.” He rested his hand on the engineer’s shoulder as he kicked off his shoes. “Nature is a merciful deity,” he said. “Her anger never lasts forever. The fire dies. The storm blows itself out. The flood recedes. And this will end as well. You’ll see. Get some rest.”

He shuffled into the windowless room, leaving Attilius to close the door behind him.

The engineer stayed where he was, leaning against the wall, watching the rain of pumice. After a while he heard loud snores emanating from the bedroom. Extraordinary, he thought. Either the admiral was pretending to be asleep—which he doubted—or the old man really had nodded off. He glanced at the sky. Presumably Pliny was right, and the “manifestation,” as he still insisted on calling it, would begin to weaken. But that was not happening yet. If anything, the force of the storm was intensifying. He detected a different, harsher sound to the dropping rock, and the ground beneath his feet was trembling, as it had in Pompeii. He ventured out a cautious pace from beneath the canopy, holding his torch toward the ground, and immediately he was struck hard on his arm. He almost dropped the torch. He grabbed a lump of the freshly fallen rock. Pressing himself against the wall he examined it in the light.

It was grayer than the earlier pumice—denser, larger, as if several pieces had been fused together—and it was hitting the ground with greater force. The shower of frothy white rock had been unpleasant and frightening but not especially painful. To be struck by a piece of this would be enough to knock a man unconscious. How long had this been going on?

He carried it into the hall and gave it to Torquatus. “It’s getting worse,” he said. “While we’ve been eating, the stones have been getting heavier.” And then, to Pomponianus, “What sort of roofs do you have here, sir? Flat or pitched?”

“Flat,” said Pomponianus. “They form terraces. You know—for the views across the bay.”

Ah yes, thought Attilius— the famous views. Perhaps if they had spent a little less time gazing out to sea and rather more looking over their shoulders at the mountain behind them, they might have been better prepared. “And how old is the house?”

“It’s been in my family for generations,” said Pomponianus proudly. “Why?”

“It isn’t safe. With that weight of rock falling on it—and on old timber, too—sooner or later the joists will give way. We need to go outside.”