Robert Harris - Pompeii

The young man groaned and staggered toward the town. “Julia! Julia!” His voice grew fainter as his wavering lamp disappeared into the darkness. “Julia!”

Attilius said loudly, “Which gate is this?”

He was answered by the same man. “The Stabian.”

“So this is the road that leads up to the Gate of Vesuvius?”

“Don’t tell him!” hissed a voice. “He’s just a stranger, come to rob us!”

Other men with torches were forcing their way up the ramp.

“Thieves!” shrieked a woman. “Our properties are all unguarded! Thieves!”

A punch was thrown, someone swore, and suddenly the narrow entrance was a tangle of shadows and waving torches. The engineer kept his hand on the wall and stumbled forward, treading on bodies. A man cursed and fingers closed around his ankle. Attilius jerked his leg free. He reached the end of the gate and glanced behind him just in time to see a torch jammed into a woman’s face and her hair catch fire. Her screams pursued him as he turned and tried to run, desperate to escape the brawl, which now seemed to be sucking in people from the side alleys, men and women emerging from the darkness, shadows out of shadows, slipping and sliding down the slope to join the fight.

Madness: an entire town driven mad.

He waded on up the hill trying to find his bearings. He was sure this was the way to the Vesuvius Gate—he could see the orange fringes of fire working their way across the mountain far ahead, which meant he couldn’t be far from the house of the Popidii; it should be on this very street. Off to his left was a big building, its roof gone, a fire burning somewhere inside it, lighting behind the windows the giant, bearded face of the god Bacchus—a theater, was it? To his right were the stumpy shapes of houses, like a row of ground-down teeth, only a few feet of wall left visible. He swayed toward them. Torches were moving. A few fires had been lit. People were digging frantically, some with planks of wood, a few with their bare hands. Others were calling out names, dragging out boxes, carpets, pieces of broken furniture. An old woman screaming hysterically. Two men fighting over something—he couldn’t see what—another trying to run with a marble bust cradled in his arms.

He saw a team of horses, frozen in mid-gallop, swooping out of the gloom above his head, and he stared at them stupidly for a moment until he realized it was the equestrian monument at the big crossroads. He went back down the hill again, past what he remembered was a bakery, and at last, very faintly on a wall, at knee height, he found an inscription:HIS NEIGHBORS URGE THE ELECTION OF LUCIUS POPIDIUS SECUNDUS AS AEDILE. HE WILL PROVE WORTHY.

He managed to squeeze through a window on one of the side streets and picked his way among the rubble, calling her name. There was no sign of life.

It was still possible to work out the arrangement of the two houses by the walls of the upper stories. The roof of the atrium had collapsed, but the flat space next to it must have been where the swimming pool was and over there must have been a second courtyard. He poked his head into some of the rooms of what had once been the upper floor. Dimly he could make out broken pieces of furniture, smashed crockery, scraps of hanging drapery. Even where the roofs had been sloping they had given way under the onslaught of stone. Drifts of pumice were mixed with terra-cotta tiles, bricks, splintered beams. He found an empty birdcage on what must have been a balcony and stepped through into an abandoned bedroom, open to the sky. Obviously it had been a young woman’s room: abandoned jewelry, a comb, a broken mirror. In the filthy half-light, a doll, partly buried in the remains of the roof, looked grotesquely like a dead child. He lifted what he thought was a blanket from the bed and saw that it was a cloak. He tried the door—locked—then sat on the bed and examined the cloak more closely.

He had never had much of an eye for what women wore. Sabina used to say that she could have dressed in rags and he would never have noticed. But this, he was sure, was Corelia’s. Popidius had said she had been locked in her room and this was a woman’s bedroom. There was no sign of a body, either here or outside. For the first time he dared to hope she had escaped. But when? And to where?

He turned the cloak over in his hands and tried to think what Ampliatus would have done. “He wanted to imprison us all”—Popidius’s phrase. Presumably he had blocked all the exits and ordered everyone to sit it out. But there must have come a moment, toward evening, as the roofs began to collapse, when even Ampliatus would have recognized that the old house was a death trap. He was not the type to wait around and die without a fight. He would not have fled the city, though: that wouldn’t have been in character, and besides, by then it would have been impossible to travel very far. No: he would have tried to lead his family to a safe location.

Attilius raised Corelia’s cloak to his face and inhaled her scent. Perhaps she would have tried to get away from her father. She hated him enough. But he would never have let her go. He imagined they must have organized a procession, very like the one from Pomponianus’s villa at Stabiae. Pillows or blankets tied around their heads. Torches to provide a little light. Out into the hail of rock. And then—where? Where was safe? He tried to think as an engineer. What kind of roof was strong enough to withstand the stresses imposed by eight feet of pumice? Nothing flat, that was for sure. Something built with modern methods. A dome would be ideal. But where was there a modern dome in Pompeii?

He dropped the cloak and stumbled back onto the balcony.

Hundreds of people were out in the streets now, milling around at roof level in the semidarkness, like ants whose nest had been kicked to pieces. Some were aimless—lost, bewildered, demented with grief. He saw a man calmly removing his clothes and folding them as if preparing for a swim. Others appeared purposeful, pursuing their own private schemes of search or escape. Thieves—or perhaps they were the rightful owners: who could tell anymore?—darted into the alleyways with whatever they could carry. Worst of all were the names called plaintively in the darkness. Had anyone seen Felicio or Pherusa, or Verus, or Appuleia—the wife of Narcissus?—or Specula, or the lawyer Terentius Neo? Parents had become separated from their children. Children stood screaming outside the ruins of houses. Torches flared toward Attilius in the hope that he might be someone else—a father, a husband, a brother. He waved them away, shrugging off their questions, intent on counting off the city blocks as he passed them, climbing the hill north toward the Vesuvius Gate—one, two, three: each seemed to take an age to come to an end and all he could hope was that his memory had not let him down.

At least a hundred fires were burning on the south side of the mountain, spread out in a complex constellation, hanging low in the sky. Attilius had learned to distinguish between Vesuvius’s flames. These were safe: the aftereffects of a trauma that had passed. It was the prospect of another incandescent cloud appearing above them on the crest of the mountain that filled him with dread and made him push his aching legs beyond the point of exhaustion as he waded through the shattered city.

At the corner of the fourth block he found the row of shops, three-quarters buried, and scrambled up the slope of pumice onto the low roof. He crouched just behind the ridge. Its outline was sharp. There must be fires beyond it. Slowly he raised his head. Across the flat surface of the buried builders’ yard were the nine high windows of Ampliatus’s baths, each one brilliantly—defiantly—lit by torches and by scores of oil lamps. He could see some of the painted gods on the far walls and the figures of men moving in front of them. All that was lacking was music: then it would have looked as though a party were in progress.