Pompeii (42 page)
DILUCULUM
[
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
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.
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.