Robert Harris: Pompeii

The fires on the side of Vesuvius had also dwindled to an occasional tiny fountain of orange sparks. More red lightning gave a pinkish glow to the underside of the black cloud. He was no longer sure in which direction he was facing. He was disembodied, utterly alone, buried almost up to his thighs in stone, the earth whirling and thundering around him. He flung away his extinguished torch and let himself sink forward. He stretched out his hands and lay there, feeling the mantle of pumice slowly accumulating around his shoulders, and it was peculiarly comforting, like being tucked up in bed at night as a child. He laid his cheek to the warm rock and felt himself relax. A great sense of tranquility suffused him. If this was death then it was not too bad: he could accept this—welcome it, even, as one might a well-earned rest at the end of a hard day’s work out on the arcades of the aqueducts.

In his dreams the ground was melting and he was dropping, tumbling, in a cascade of rocks, toward the center of the earth.

He was woken by heat, and by the smell of burning.

He didn’t know how long he had slept. Long enough to be almost entirely buried. He was in his grave. Panicking, he pushed with his forearms and slowly he felt the weight on his shoulders yield and split, heard the rustle of stones as they tumbled off him. He raised himself and shook his head, spitting the dust from his mouth, blinking his eyes, still buried below the waist.

The rain of pumice had mostly stopped—the familiar warning sign—and in the distance, immediately before him, low in the sky, he saw again the familiar scythe of glowing cloud. Except that this time, instead of moving like a comet from right to left, it was descending fast and spreading laterally, coming his way. Immediately behind it was an interval of darkness that sprang into fire a few moments later as the heat found fresh fuel on the southern flank of the mountain; before it, carried on the furnace wind, came a rolling boom of noise, such that if he had been Pliny he would have varied his metaphor and described it not as a cloud but as a wave—a boiling wave of red-hot vapor that scorched his cheeks and watered his eyes. He could smell his hair singeing.

He writhed to free himself from the grip of the pumice as the sulfurous dawn raced across the sky toward him. Something dark was growing in the center of it, rising out of the ground, and he realized that the crimson light was silhouetting a town less than half a mile away. The vision brightened. He picked out city walls and watchtowers, the pillars of a roofless temple, a row of blasted, sightless windows—and people, the shadows of people, running in panic along the lines of the ramparts. The spectacle was sharp for only a little while, just long enough for him to recognize it as Pompeii, and then the glow behind it slowly faded, taking the city with it, back into the darkness.

DILUCULUM

[06:00 hours]

It is dangerous to assume that the worst is over after the

initial explosive phase. Predicting an eruption’s end is

even more difficult than predicting its beginning.

— ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VOLCANOES

He pulled off his helmet and used it as a bucket, digging the lip of the metal into the pumice and emptying it over his shoulder. Gradually as he worked he became aware of the pale white shapes of his arms. He stopped and raised them in wonder. Such a trivial matter, to be able to see one’s hands, and yet he could have cried with relief. The morning was coming. A new day was struggling to be born. He was still alive.

He finished digging, wrestled his legs loose, and hauled himself up onto his feet. The freshly ignited crop of fires high up on Vesuvius had restored his sense of direction. Perhaps it was his imagination, but he even thought he could see the shadow of the city. Vague in the darkness, the plain of pumice spread out around him, a ghostly, gently undulating landscape. He set off toward Pompeii, wading up to his knees again, sweating, thirsty, dirty, with the acrid stench of burning in his nose and throat. He assumed, by the nearness of the city walls, that he must be almost inside the port, in which case there ought to be a river somewhere. But the pumice had submerged the Sarnus into the desert of stones. Through the dust he had a vague impression of low walls on either side of him and as he stumbled forward he realized that these weren’t fences but buildings, buried buildings, and that he was laboring along a street at roof level. The pumice must be seven or eight feet deep at least.

Impossible to believe that people could have lived through such a bombardment. And yet they had. Not only had he seen them moving on the city’s ramparts, he could see them now, emerging from holes in the ground, from beneath the tombs of their houses—individuals, couples supporting each other, whole familes, even a mother holding a baby. They stood around in the grainy brown half-light, brushing the dust from their clothes, gazing at the sky. Apart from an occasional scattering of missiles the fall of rock had ceased. But it would come again, Attilius was certain. There was a pattern. The greater the surge of burning air down the slopes of the mountain, the more energy it seemed to suck from the storm and the longer the lull before it started anew. There was no doubt, either, that the surges were growing in strength. The first appeared to have hit Herculaneum; the second to have traveled beyond it, out to sea; the third to have reached almost as far as Pompeii itself. The next might easily sweep across the entire town. He plowed on.

The harbor had entirely vanished. A few masts poking out of the sea of pumice, a broken sternpost, and the shrouded outline of a hull were the only clues that it had ever existed. He could hear the sea, but it sounded a long way off. The shape of the coast had altered. Occasionally, the ground shook and then would come the distant crash of walls and timbers giving way, roofs collapsing. A ball of lightning fizzed across the landscape and struck the distant columns of the temple of Venus. A fire started. It became harder to make progress. He sensed that he was wading up a slope and he tried to visualize how the port had looked, the ramped roads leading up from the wharves and quaysides to the city gates. Torches loomed out of the smoky air and passed him. He had expected to encounter crowds of survivors seizing the opportunity to escape from the town, but the traffic was all the other way. People were going back into Pompeii. Why? To search for those they had lost, he supposed. To see what they could retrieve from their homes. To loot. He wanted to tell them to run for it while they had the chance but he hadn’t the breath. A man pushed him out of the way and overtook him, jerking from side to side like a marionette as he scrambled through the drifts.

Attilius reached the top of the ramp. He groped through the dusty twilight until he found a corner of heavy masonry and felt his way around it, into the low tunnel that was all that remained of the great entrance to the town. He could have reached up and touched the vaulted roof. Someone lumbered up to him from behind and seized his arm. “Have you seen my wife?”

He was holding a small oil lamp, with his hand cupped around the flame—a young man, handsome, and incongruously immaculate, as if he had been out for a stroll before breakfast. Attilius saw that the fingers encircling the lamp were manicured.

“I’m sorry—”

“Julia Felix? You must know her. Everyone knows her.” His voice was trembling. He called out, “Has anyone here seen Julia Felix?”

There was a stir of movement and Attilius realized there were a dozen or more people, crammed together, sheltering in the passageway of the gate.

“She’s not been this way,” someone muttered.