One of Cleopatra's Nights (12 page)

Alas! she spoke truly indeed. I have regretted her more than once, and I
regret her still. My soul's peace has been very dearly bought. The love
of God was not too much to replace such a love as hers. And this,
brother, is the story of my youth. Never gaze upon a woman, and walk
abroad only with eyes ever fixed upon the ground; for however chaste and
watchful one may be, the error of a single moment is enough to make one
lose eternity.

Three young friends, who had under-taken an Italian tour together last
year, visited the Studii Museum at Naples, where the various antique
objects exhumed from the ashes of Pompeii and Herculaneum have been
collected.

They scattered through the halls, inspecting the mosaics, the bronzes,
the frescoes detached from the walls of the dead city, each following
the promptings of his own particular taste in such matters; and whenever
one of the party encountered something especially curious, he summoned
his comrades with cries of delight, much to the scandal of the taciturn
English visitors, and the staid
bourgeois
who studiously thumbed
their catalogues.

But the youngest of the three, who had paused before a glass case,
appeared wholly deaf to the exclamations of his comrades, so deeply had
he become absorbed in contemplation. The object that he seemed to be
examining with so much interest was a black mass of coagulated cinders,
bearing a hollow imprint. One might easily have mistaken it for the
fragment of some statue-mould, broken in the casting. The trained eye of
an artist would have readily therein recognized the impression of a
perfect bosom and a flank as faultless in its outlines as a Greek
statue. It is well known, indeed the commonest traveller's guide will
tell you, that this lava, in cooling about the body of a woman,
preserved its charming contours. Thanks to the caprice of the eruption
that destroyed four cities, that noble form, though crumbled to dust
nearly two thousand years ago, has come down to us; the rounded
loveliness of a throat has lived through the centuries in which so many
empires perished without even leaving the traces of their existence;
chance-imprinted upon the volcanic scoriæ, that seal of beauty remains
unobliterated.

Finding that he still remained absorbed in contemplation, Octavian's
friends returned to where he stood; and Max, touching his shoulder,
caused him to start like one surprised in a secret. Evidently Octavian
had not been aware of the approach of Max or Fabio.

"Come, Octavian," exclaimed Max, "do not stay lingering whole hours
before every cabinet, else we shall get late for the train and miss
seeing Pompeii to-day."

"What is our comrade looking at?" asked Fabio, drawing near. "Ah, the
imprint found in the house of Arrius Diomedes!" And he turned a
peculiar, quick glance upon Octavian.

Octavian slightly blushed, took Max's arm, and the visit terminated
without further incident. On leaving the Studii Museum, the three
friends entered a
corricolo,
and were driven to the railway station.
The
corricolo
, with its great red wheels, its tracket seat studded
with brass nails, and its thin, spirited horse harnessed like a Spanish
mule, and galloping at full speed over the great slabs of lava pavement,
is too familiar to need description here, especially as we are not
recording impressions of a trip to Naples, but the simple narrative of
an adventure which, although true, may seem both fantastic and
incredible in the extreme.

The railroad by which Pompeii is reached runs for almost its entire
length by the sea, whose long volutes of foam advance to unroll
themselves upon a beach of blackish sand resembling sifted charcoal.
This beach has actually been formed by lava-streams and volcanic
cinders, and its deep tone forms a strong contrast with the blue of the
sky and the blue of the waters. The earth alone, in that sunny
brightness, seems able to retain a shadow.

The villages bordered or traversed by the railway—Portici, celebrated
in one of Auber's operas; Resina, Torre del Græco, Torre dell'
Annunziata, whose dwellings with their arcades and terraced roofs
attract the traveller's gaze—have, notwithstanding the intensity of the
sunlight and the southern love for whitewashing, something of a
Plutonian and ferruginous character like Birmingham or Manchester. The
very dust is black there. An impalpable soot clings to everything. One
feels that the mighty forge of Vesuvius is panting and smoking only a
few paces off.

The three friends left the station at Pompeii, laughing among themselves
at the odd commingling of antique and modern ideas suggested by the
sign, "Pompeii Station"—a Græco-Roman city and a railway depot!

They crossed the cotton-field, with its fluttering white bolls, between
the railway and the disinterred city, and at the inn which has been
built just without the ancient rampart they took a guide, or, more
correctly speaking, the guide took them, a calamity which is not easily
avoided in Italy.

It was one of those delightful days so common in Naples, when the
brilliancy of the sunlight and the transparency of the air cause objects
to take such hues as in the North would be deemed fabulous, and appear
indeed to belong to the world of dreams rather than to that of
realities. The Northern visitor who has once looked upon that glow of
azure and gold is apt to carry back with him into the depths of his
native fogs an incurable nostalgia.

Having shaken off a corner of her cinder shroud, the resurrected city
again rose with her thousand details under a dazzling day. The cone of
Vesuvius, furrowed with striæ of blue, rosy, and violet-hued lavas,
ruddily bronzed by the sun, towered sharply defined in the background. A
thin haze, almost imperceptible in the sunlight, hooded the blunt crest
of the mountain. At first sight it might have been taken for one of
those clouds which shadow the brows of lofty peaks on the fairest days.
Upon a nearer view, slender threads of white vapor could be perceived
rising from the mountain-summit, as from the orifices of a perfuming
pan, to reunite above in a light cloud. The volcano, being that day in a
good humor, smoked his pipe very peacefully; and but for the example of
Pompeii, buried at his feet, no one would ever have suspected him of
being by nature any more ferocious than Montmartre. On the other side
fair hills, with outlines voluptuously undulating like the hips of a
woman, barred the horizon; and, further yet, the sea, that in other days
bore biremes and triremes under the ramparts of the city, extended its
azure boundary.

Of all spectacles, the sight of Pompeii is one of the most surprising.
This sudden backward leap of nineteen centuries astonishes even the
least comprehensive and most prosaic natures. Two paces lead you from
the antique life to the life of to-day, and from Christianity to
paganism. Thus, when the three friends beheld those streets wherein the
forms of a vanished past are preserved yet intact, they were strangely
and profoundly affected, however well prepared by the study of books and
drawings they might have been. Octavian, above all, seemed stricken with
stupefaction, and like a man walking in his sleep, mechanically followed
the guide, without hearing the monotonous nomenclature that the varlet
had learned by heart and recited like a lesson.

He gazed wildly on those ruts hollowed out in the cyclopean pavements of
the streets by the chariot wheels, and which seem to be of yesterday,
so fresh do they appear; those inscriptions in red letters skilfully
traced upon the surfaces of the walls by rapid strokes of the brush
(theatrical advertisements, notices of houses to let, votive formulas,
signs, announcements of all descriptions, not less curious than a
freshly discovered fragment of the walls of Paris, with advertising
bills and placards attached, would prove a thousand years hence for the
unknown people of the future); those houses, whose shattered roofs
permit one to penetrate at a glance into all those interior mysteries,
all those domestic details which historians invariably neglect, and
whereof the secrets die with dying civilizations; those fountains that
even now seem scarcely dried up; that forum whose restoration was
interrupted by the great catastrophe, and whose architraves and columns,
all ready cut and sculptured, still seem waiting in their purity of
angle to be lifted into place; those temples, consecrated, in that
mythologic age when atheists were yet unknown, to gods that have long
ceased to be; those shops wherein the merchant only is missing; that
public tavern where may still be seen the circular stain of the drinking
cups upon the marble; that barracks with its ochre and minium-painted
columns, on which the soldiers scratched grotesque caricatures of
battle, and those juxtaposed double theatres of song and drama which
might even now resume their entertainments, were not the companies who
performed in them turned long since to clay, and at present occupied
perchance in closing the bunghole of a cask or stopping a crevice in the
wall, after the fashion of Alexander's ashes or Cæsar's dust, according
to the melancholy reflections of Hamlet!

Fabio mounted upon the thymele of the tragic theatre while Max and
Octavian climbed to the upper benches; and there, with extravagant
gestures, he commenced to recite whatever poetical fragments came to his
memory, much to the terror of the lizards, who fled, vibrating their
tails, and hid themselves in the joints of the ruined stonework.
Although the brazen or earthen vessels formerly used to reverberate
sounds no longer existed, Fabio's voice sounded none the less full and
vibrant.

The guide then conducted them across the open fields which overlie those
portions of Pompeii still buried, to the amphitheatre situated at the
other end of the city. They passed under those trees whose roots plunge
down through the roofs of the edifices interred, displacing tiles,
cleaving ceilings asunder, and disjointing columns; and they traversed
the farms where vulgar vegetables sprout above wonders of art—material
images of that oblivion wherewith time covers all things.

The amphitheatre caused them little surprise. They had seen that of
Verona, vaster and equally well preserved; besides, the arrangement of
such antique arenas was as familiar to them as that of those in which
bull-fights are held in Spain, and which they much resemble save in
solidity of construction and beauty of material.

Accordingly they soon retraced their footsteps and gained the Street of
Fortune by a cross-path, listening half-distractedly to the
cicerone
,
who named each house they passed by the name which had been given it
immediately upon its discovery, owing to some characteristic
peculiarity—the House of the Brazen Bull, the House of the Faun, the
House of the Ship, the Temple of Fortune, the House of Meleager, the
Tavern of Fortune, at the angle of the Consular Road (Via Consularia),
the Academy of Music, the Public Market, the Pharmacy, the Surgeon's
Shop, the Custom House, the House of the Vestals, the Inn of Albinus,
the Thermopolium, and so on—until they came to that gate which leads to
the Street of the Tombs.

Within the interior arch of this brick-built gate, once adorned with
statues which have long since disappeared, may be noticed two deep
grooves designed to receive a sliding portcullis, after the style of a
mediæval donjon, to which era, indeed, one might have supposed such a
defence peculiar.

"Who," exclaimed Max to his friends, "could have dreamed of finding in
Pompeii, the Græco-Latin city, a gate so romantically Gothic? Fancy
some belated Roman knight blowing his horn before this entrance,
summoning them to raise the portcullis, like a page of the fifteenth
century!"

"There is nothing new under the sun," replied Fabio; "and the aphorism
itself is not new, inasmuch as it was formulated by Solomon."

"Perhaps there may be something new under the moon," observed Octavian,
with a smile of melancholy irony.

"My dear Octavian," cried Max, who during this little conversation had
paused before an inscription traced in rubric upon the outer wall, "wilt
behold the combats of the gladiators? See the advertisement! Combat and
chase on the 5th day of the nones of April; the masts of the velarium
will be rigged; twenty pairs of gladiators will fight during the nones;
if you fear for the delicacy of your complexion, be assured that the
awnings will be spread; and as you might in any case prefer to visit the
amphitheatre early, these men will cut each other's throats in the
morning—
matutini erunt.
Nothing could be more considerate."

Thus chatting, the three friends followed that sepulchre-fringed road
which, according to our modern ideas, would be a lugubrious avenue for
any city, but which had no sad significations for the ancients, whose
tombs contained in lieu of hideous corpses only a pinch of
dust—abstract idea of death! Art beautified these last resting-places,
and, as Goethe says, the pagan decorated sarcophagi and funeral urns
with the images of life.

It was therefore, doubtless, that Fabio and Max could visit, with a
lively curiosity and a joyous sense of being, such as they could not
have felt in any Christian cemetery, those funeral monuments, all gayly
gilded by the sun, which, as they stood by the wayside, seemed still
trying to cling to life, and inspired none of those chill feelings of
repulsion, none of those fantastic terrors evoked by our modern dismal
places of sepulture. They paused before the tomb of Mammia, the public
priestess, near which a tree (either a cypress or a willow) is growing;
they seated themselves in the hemicycle of the triclinium, where the
funeral feasts were held, laughing like fortunate heirs; they read with
mock solemnity the epitaphs of Navoleia, Labeon, and the Arria family,
silently followed by Octavian, who seemed more deeply touched than his
careless companions by the fate of those dead of two thousand years ago.