Pompeii (38 page)

“We shall rescue Rectina and the library and carry them to safety, then join Antius and the rest of the fleet in evacuating people farther down the coast—how does that sound to you, captain?”

“As the admiral wishes,” responded Torquatus stiffly. “May I ask what time your clock shows?”

“The start of the tenth hour,” said Alexion.

The captain raised his eyebrows. “So, then—just three hours of full daylight remain.”

He left the implication hanging in the air, but the admiral waved it away. “Look at the speed we’re making, captain! We’ll soon be at the coast.”

“Yes, and the wind that drives us forward will make it all the harder for us to put to sea again.”

“Sailors!” mocked the admiral over the sound of the waves. “Are you listening, engineer? I swear, they’re worse than farmers when it comes to the weather. They moan when there isn’t a wind, and then complain even louder when there is!”

“Admiral!” Torquatus saluted. “If you will excuse me?” He turned away, his jaw clamped tight, and made his way, swaying, toward the prow.

“Observations at the tenth hour,” said Pliny. “Are you ready, Alexion?” He placed his fingertips together and frowned. It was a considerable technical challenge to describe a phenomenon for which the language had not yet been invented. After a while, the various metaphors—columns, tree trunks, fountains, and the like—seemed to obscure rather than illuminate, failing to capture the sublime power of what he was witnessing. He should have brought a poet with him—he would have been more use than this cautious captain. “Drawing closer,” he began, “the manifestation appears as a gigantic, heavy rain cloud, increasingly black. As with a storm viewed from a distance of several miles, it is possible to see individual plumes of rain, drifting like smoke across the dark surface. And yet, according to the engineer Marcus Attilius, these are falls not of rain but of rock.” He pointed to the poop deck beside him. “Come up here, engineer. Describe to us again what you saw. For the record.”

Attilius climbed the short ladder to the platform. There was something utterly incongruous about the way in which the admiral had arranged himself—with his slave, his portable desk, his thronelike chair, and his water clock—when set against the fury into which they were sailing. Even though the wind was at his back, he could hear the roar from the mountain now, and the towering cascade of rock was suddenly much nearer, their ship as fragile as a leaf at the base of a waterfall. He started to give his account once more and then a bolt of lightning arced across the roiling mass of cloud—not white, but a brilliant, jagged streak of red. It hung in the air, like a vivid vein of blood, and Alexion started to cluck his tongue, which was how the superstitious worshipped lightning.

“Add that to the list of phenomena,” commanded Pliny. “Lightning: a grievous portent.”

Torquatus shouted, “We’re sailing too close!”

Beyond the admiral’s shoulder, Attilius could see the warships of the Misene fleet, still in sunlight, streaming out of harbor in a V formation, like a squadron of flying geese. But then he became aware that the sky was darkening. A barrage of falling stones was exploding on the surface of the sea to their right, creeping rapidly closer. The prows and sails of the triremes blurred, dissolved to ghost ships, as the air was filled with whirling rock.

In the pandemonium, Torquatus was everywhere, bellowing orders. Men ran along the deck in the half-light. The ropes supporting the yardarm were unhitched and the sail lowered. The helmsman swung hard left. An instant later a ball of lightning came hurtling from the sky, touched the top of the mast, traveled down it and then along the yardarm. In the brilliance of its glare Attilius saw the admiral with his head ducked and his hands pressed to the back of his neck, and his secretary leaning forward to protect his papyri. The fireball shot off the edge of the pole and plunged into the sea, trailing fumes of sulfur. It died with a violent hiss, taking its light with it. He closed his eyes. If the sail hadn’t been lowered it would surely have gone up in flames. He could feel the drumming of the stones on his shoulders, hear them rattling across the deck. The
Minerva
must be brushing along the edge of the cloud, he realized, and Torquatus was trying to row them out from beneath it—and abruptly he succeeded. There was a final lash of missiles and they burst back out into the sunshine.

He heard Pliny coughing and opened his eyes to see the admiral standing, brushing the debris from the folds of his toga. He had held on to a handful of stones and as he flopped back into his chair he examined them in his palm. All along the length of the ship, men were shaking their clothes and feeling their flesh for cuts. The
Minerva
was still steering directly toward
Herculaneum
, now less than a mile distant and clearly visible, but the wind was rising, and the sea with it, the helmsman straining to keep them to their course as the waves crashed against the left side of the ship.

“Encounter with the manifestation,” said Pliny calmly. He stopped to wipe his face on his sleeve and coughed again. “Are you taking this down? What time is it?”

Alexion tipped the stones from his papyri and blew away the dust. He leaned toward the clock. “The mechanism is broken, admiral.” His voice was trembling. He was almost in tears.

“Well, no matter. Let’s say the eleventh hour.” Pliny held up one of the stones and peered at it closely. “The material is
a frothy
, bubbled pumice. Grayish-white. As light as ash, which falls in fragments no larger than a man’s thumb.” He paused and added gently: “Take up your pen, Alexion. If there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s cowardice.”

The secretary’s hand was shaking. It was hard for him to write as the liburnian pitched and rolled. His pen slipped across the surface of the papyrus in an illegible scrawl. The admiral’s chair slid across the deck and Attilius grabbed it. He said, “You ought to move belowdecks,” as Torquatus stumbled toward them, bareheaded.

“Take my helmet, admiral.”

“Thank you, captain, but this old skull of mine provides quite adequate protection.”

“Admiral—I beg you. This wind will run us straight into the storm—we must turn back!”

Pliny ignored him. “The pumice is less like rock than airy fragments of a frozen cloud.” He craned his neck to stare over the side of the ship. “It floats on the surface of the sea like lumps of ice. Do you see? Extraordinary!”

Attilius had not noticed it before. The water was covered in a carpet of stone. The oars brushed it aside with every stroke but more floated in immediately to replace it. Torquatus ran to the low wall of the deck. They were surrounded.

A wave of pumice broke over the front of the ship.

“Admiral—”

“Fortune favors the brave, Torquatus. Steer toward the shore!”

For a short while longer they managed to plow on, but the pace of the oars was weakening, defeated not by the wind or the waves but by the clogging weight of pumice on the water. It deepened as they neared the coast, two or three feet thick—a broad expanse of rustling dry surf. The blades of the oars flailed helplessly across it, unable to bring any pressure to bear, and the ship began to drift with the wind toward the waterfall of rock. The Villa Calpurnia was tantalizingly close. Attilius recognized the spot where he had stood with Rectina. He could see figures running along the shore, the piles of books,
the
fluttering white robes of the Epicurean philosophers.

Pliny had stopped dictating and, with Attilius’s assistance, had pulled himself up onto his feet. All around the timber was creaking as the pressure of the pumice squeezed the hull. The engineer felt him sag slightly as, for the first time, he seemed to appreciate that they were defeated. He stretched out his hand toward the shore. “Rectina,” he murmured.

The rest of the fleet was beginning to scatter, the V formation disintegrating as the ships battled to save themselves. And then it was dusk again and the familiar thunder of pumice hammering drowned out every other sound. Torquatus shouted, “We’ve lost control of the ship! Everybody—belowdecks. Engineer—help me lift him down from here.”

“My records!” protested Pliny.

“Alexion has your records, admiral.” Attilius had him by one arm and the captain by the other. He was immensely heavy. He stumbled on the last step and nearly fell full-length but they managed to retrieve him and lugged him along the deck toward the open trapdoor that led down to the rowing stations as the air turned to rock. “Make way for the admiral!” panted Torquatus and then they almost threw him down the ladder. Alexion went next with the precious papyri, treading on the admiral’s shoulders, then Attilius jumped down in a shower of pumice, and finally Torquatus, slamming the trap behind them.

VESPERA

[
20:02
hours]

During [the first] phase the vent radius was probably of the order
of 100 metres. As the eruption continued, inevitable widening of
the vent permitted still higher mass eruption rates. By the evening
of the 24
^th
, the column height had increased. Progressively deeper
levels within the magma chamber were tapped, until after about
seven hours the more mafic grey pumice was reached. This was
ejected at about 1.5 million tonnes per second, and carried by
convection to maximum heights of around 33 kilometres.

—
VOLCANOES: A PLANETARY PERSPECTIVE

In the stifling heat and the near darkness beneath the
Minerva’
s decks they crouched and listened to the drumming of the stones above them. The air was rank with the sweat and breath of two hundred sailors. Occasionally, a foreign voice would cry out in some unrecognizable tongue only to be silenced by a harsh shout from one of the officers. A man near Attilius moaned repeatedly that it was the end of the world—and that, indeed, was what it felt like to the engineer. Nature had reversed herself so that they were drowning beneath rock in the middle of the sea, drifting in the depths of night during the bright hours of the day. The ship was rocking violently but none of the oars was moving. There was no purpose to any activity, since they had no idea of the direction in which they were pointing. There was nothing to do but endure, each man huddled in his own thoughts.

How long this went on, Attilius could not calculate. Perhaps one hour; perhaps two. He wasn’t even sure where he was belowdecks. He knew that he was clinging to a narrow wooden gantry that seemed to run the length of the ship, with the double banks of sailors crammed on benches on either side. He could hear Pliny wheezing somewhere close, Alexion snuffling like a child. Torquatus was entirely silent. The incessant hammering of the pumice, sharp to begin with as it rattled on the timber of the deck, gradually became more muffled, as pumice fell on pumice, sealing them off from the world. And that, for him, was the worst thing—the sense of this mass slowly pressing down on them, burying them alive. As time passed he began to wonder how long the joists of the deck would hold, or whether the sheer weight of what was above them would push them beneath the waves. He tried to console himself with the thought that pumice was light: the engineers in
Rome
, when they were constructing a great dome, sometimes mixed it into the cement in place of rock and fragments of brick. Nevertheless he gradually became aware that the ship was starting to list and very soon after that a cry of panic went up from some of the sailors to his right that water was pouring through the oar-holes.

Torquatus shouted at them roughly to be quiet, then called down the gantry to Pliny that he needed to take a party of men abovedecks to try to shovel off the rock fall.

“Do what you have to do, captain,” replied the admiral. His voice was calm. “This is Pliny!” he suddenly bellowed above the roar of the storm. “I expect every man to bear himself like a Roman soldier! And when we return to Misenum, you will all be rewarded, I promise you!”