Robert Harris: Pompeii

The final day of the eruption

INCLINATIO

[00:12 hours]

There comes a point when so much magma is being erupted so

quickly that the eruption column density becomes too great

for stable convection to persist. When this condition prevails,

column collapse takes place, generating pyroclastic flows and

surges, which are far more lethal than tephra fall.

— VOLCANOES: A PLANETARY PERSPECTIVE

The light traveled slowly downward from right to left. A sickle of luminous cloud—that was how Pliny described it—sweeping down the western slope of Vesuvius, leaving in its wake a patchwork of fires. Some were winking, isolated pinpricks—farmhouses and villas that had been set alight. But elsewhere whole swaths of the forest were blazing. Vivid, leaping sheets of red-and-orange flame tore jagged holes in the darkness. The scythe moved on, implacably, for at least as long as it would have taken to count to a hundred, flared briefly, and vanished.

“The manifestation,” dictated Pliny, “has moved into a different phase.”

To Attilius, there was something indefinably sinister about that silent, moving crest—its mysterious appearance, its enigmatic death. Born in the ruptured summit of the mountain, it must have rolled away to drown itself in the sea. He remembered the fertile vineyards, the heavy clumps of grapes, the manacled slaves. There would be no vintage this year, ripe or otherwise.

“It’s hard to tell from here,” Torquatus said, “but judging by its position, I reckon that cloud of flame may just have passed over Herculaneum.”

“And yet it doesn’t seem to be on fire,” replied Attilius. “That part of the coast looks entirely dark. It’s as if the town has vanished.”

They looked toward the base of the burning mountain, searching for some point of light, but there was nothing.

The effect on the beach at Stabiae was to shift the balance of terror, first one way and then the other. They could soon smell the fires on the wind, a pungent, acrid taste of sulfur and cinders. Someone screamed that they would all be burned alive. People sobbed, none louder than Lucius Popidius, who was calling for his mother, and then someone else—it was one of the sailors who had been prodding the roof with his oar—exclaimed that the heavy linen was no longer sagging. That quieted the panic.

Attilius cautiously stretched out his arm beyond the shelter of the tent, his palm held upward, as if checking for rain. The marine was right. The air was still full of small missiles but the storm was not as violent as before. It was as if the mountain had found a different outlet for its malevolent energy, in the rushing avalanche of fire rather than in the steady bombardment of rock. In that moment he made up his mind. Better to die doing something—better to fall beside the coastal highway and lie in some unmarked grave—than to cower beneath this flimsy shelter, filled with fearful imaginings, a spectator waiting for the end. He reached for his discarded pillow and planted it firmly on his head, then felt around in the sand for the strip of sheet. Torquatus asked him quietly what he was doing.

“Leaving.”

“Leaving?” Pliny, reclining on the sand, his notes spread around him and weighed down with piles of pumice, looked up sharply. “You’ll do no such thing. I absolutely refuse you permission to go.”

“With the greatest respect, admiral, I take my orders from Rome, not from you.” He was surprised some of the slaves had not also made a run for it. Why not? Habit, he supposed. Habit, and the lack of anywhere to run to.

“But I need you here.” There was a wheedling note in Pliny’s hoarse voice. “What if something should happen to me? Someone must make sure my observations are not lost to posterity.”

“There are others who can do that, admiral. I prefer to take my chance on the road.”

“But you’re a student of nature, engineer. I can tell it. That’s why you came. You’re much more valuable to me here. Torquatus—stop him.”

The captain hesitated, then unfastened his chin strap and took off his helmet. “Take this,” he said. “Metal is better protection than feathers.” Attilius started to protest, but Torquatus thrust it into his hands. “Take it—and good luck.”

“Thank you.” Attilius grasped his hand. “May luck go with you, too.”

It fitted him well enough. He had never worn a helmet before. He stood and picked up a torch. He felt like a gladiator about to enter the arena.

“But where will you go?” protested Pliny.

Attilius stepped into the storm. The light stones pinged off the helmet. It was utterly dark apart from the few torches planted into the sand around the perimeter of the shelter and the distant, glowing pyre of Vesuvius.

“Pompeii.”

Torquatus had estimated the distance between Stabiae and Pompeii at three miles—an hour’s walk along a good road on a fine day. But the mountain had changed the laws of time and space and for a long while Attilius seemed to make no progress at all.

He managed to get up off the beach and onto the road without too much difficulty and he was lucky that the view of Vesuvius was uninterrupted because the fires gave him an aiming point. He knew that as long as he walked straight toward them he must come to Pompeii eventually. But he was pushing into the wind, so that even though he kept his head hunched, shrinking his world to his pale legs and the little patch of stone in which he waded, the rain of pumice stung his face and clogged his mouth and nostrils with dust. With each step he sank up to his knees in pumice and the effect was like trying to climb a hill of gravel, or a barn full of grain—an endless, featureless slope that chafed his skin and tore at the muscles at the top of his thighs. Every few hundred paces he swayed to a stop and somehow, holding the torch, he had to drag first one foot and then the other out of the clinging pumice and pick the stones out of his shoes.

The temptation to lie down and rest was overwhelming and yet it had to be resisted, he knew, because sometimes he stumbled into the bodies of those who had given up already. His torch showed soft forms, mere outlines of humanity, with occasionally a protruding foot or a hand clawing at the air. And it was not only people who had died on the road. He blundered into a team of oxen that had become stuck in the drifts and a horse that had collapsed between the shafts of an abandoned wagon, its burden too heavy to pull: a stone horse pulling a stone cart. All these things appeared as brief apparitions in the flickering circle of light he carried. There must have been much more that mercifully he could not see. Sometimes the living as well as the dead emerged fleetingly out of the darkness—a man carrying a cat; a young woman, naked and deranged; another couple carrying a long brass candelabrum slung across their shoulders, the man at the front and the woman at the back. They were heading in the opposite direction from him. From either side came isolated, barely human cries and moans, such as he imagined might be heard on a battlefield after the fighting was done. He did not stop, apart from once, when he heard a child crying out for its parents. He stopped, listening, and stumbled around for a while, trying to find the source of the voice, calling out in response, but the child went quiet, perhaps out of fear at the sound of a stranger, and eventually he gave up the search.

All this lasted for several hours.

At some point the crescent of light appeared again at the summit of Vesuvius, sweeping down, following more or less the same trajectory as before. The glow was brighter and when it reached the shore, or what he guessed was the shore, it did not die at once but rolled on out to sea before tapering away into the darkness. It was followed by the same easing in the fall of rock. But this time on the slopes of the mountain it seemed to extinguish the fires rather than rekindle them. Soon afterward his torch began to stutter. Most of the pitch had burned away. He pushed on with a renewed energy born of fear because he knew that when it died he would be left helpless in the darkness. And when that moment came it was indeed terrible—more horrible than he had feared. His legs had vanished and he could see nothing, not even if he brought his hand right up to his eyes.