Now, looking out and up, Larius could see Vesuvius. The coast below the mountain was shrouded in impenetrable dark, while huge flames of different colours rent the high slopes and the sky above the volcano. Sometimes there were single streaks of light, sometimes a snaking trail, sometimes whole showers of pyrotechnics shaken out through the billowing blackness. All around grumbled the noise of whatever was happening far underground. Innumerable farms must have been destroyed. Crops and vineyards were buried, hundreds of animals were dead. People too. Even those who had managed to stay alive until now were facing cataclysmic danger.
This was when Larius cursed his fate, and he cursed from his soul, using the worst words he knew. Here he was, an eyewitness. He wanted to paint this. Generations of painters would strike awe in viewers with their Vesuvius by Night. For them would be movement and torment, fire and darkness, horror and suggested noise. They could position tiny figures, stricken by fear, contrasted against the enormity of ungovernable natural forces. Many would achieve this from imagination alone, for you cannot force a volcano to erupt when you need a model. He could have done it from life. But Larius knew, recreating this dramatic scene would never be for him.
He could only stare, as he thought of his own short life and his family − then in his wry way accepted the aching pain of so much wasted opportunity. He was a fatalist. He knew, tonight, this was the end of everything for him.
He went back to his daughter and squatted beside her, elbows on knees, face buried in his hands. All over the area people took that pose. It was a position in which they could rest − but also the posture of despair.
Chapter 12
Nonius proceeds towards magnificent prosperity. Can a man with no conscience really be happy? Of course he can.
Back in Pompeii, there had been a lull caused by the combination of nightfall and the increased ferocity of falling pumice. No one now ventured onto the streets. Pale ash lay to chest height; it was rising several inches every hour. If, from his resting place at Oplontis, Larius had given any thought to his former subtenant, he might have assumed Nonius would still be tirelessly attempting to rob people. But Nonius had gone. It was what men did, those with an instinct for self-preservation – or those protected by the gods.
The good people of Pompeii had entrusted themselves to many deities’ protection that day. Venus Pompeiana, their town’s chosen dedicatee, whose huge half-built temple towered over the Forum, stared out dramatically to the turbulent sea. Bona Dea, the Good Goddess, received many frightened pleas. Egyptian Isis. The goddess Fortune herself, who leaned on a rudder with which she governed human destiny. Apollo, light-hearted, talented past patron of the city. Giant phaluses that symbolised life, small ones with ridiculous wings or hanging bells. Jupiter the king of all … Despite amulets, signet rings, statuettes, pleadings, vows and prayers, the gods with their heartless, ruthless neutrality lent no help.
Fortune helps those who help themselves, thought Nonius, the cheery villain who had been so tenaciously helping himself to other people’s property.
As the eruption started he had worked, harder than ever in his life, continuing through as much of the day as he could. Treading the ash, peering through the murk, forcing open half-blocked doors as he battered his way in to find secreted riches. Luckily in the best houses, their valuables had been displayed in the atrium, easy to find unless owners had snatched up their treasure and inconsiderately run off with it – ignoring the need to supply Nonius.
Enough was left for him. People had locked up, intending to come home tomorrow. People buried stuff, yet left behind their spades. People dropped things as they ran. As the day had grown worse and those who remained from choice or helplessness cowered in ever deeper hiding places, Nonius coughed and staggered, yet he obtained many delightful sets of silver drinking wares: trays, jugs, pairs of cups, mixing bowls, snack saucers, spoons and ladles, little tripod stands to place your drink upon, even egg cups. He gathered dishes and jugs that were designed for religious offerings. He snatched bags of coins. He took jewellery: chains, ear-rings, bangles, finger rings, pendants, brooches, filigree hairnets. If he found no gold, he did not reject silver, alloys, even iron if it looked to have a value.
Then as the day went on, before ash filled gardens and made doors quite immovable, before he was brought to a standstill, Nonius departed from Pompeii. His sense of timing remained sharp. While roofs and balconies began to collapse all across the town, he was travelling out. He saw fires – and saw the falling pumice quench them. He heard screams and cries for help but he kept going. He was safe by the time the ceilings smashed down in the house where Larius had once worked. By then so much ash had descended, the newly decorated plasterwork landed not on the mosaic floor but on fully four feet of debris that had already poured into the house, the bakery, the garden, the stables full of panicked beasts. The baker’s hog and poultry were still on the cooking bench, definitely overcooked.
While others were trapped inside buildings or buried in the streets, Nonius escaped. While people and animals died in Pompeii, he lived. It could have been different. If Fortune was fair, Nonius would have been stuck in the doomed town. He might even have found salvation. If endings were truly cathartic in real life, he could have carried out some great act of selfless sacrifice. He might have saved someone else, or at least offered comfort to somebody deserving.
Alternatively, if the Fates had taken another view of his despicable past, for retribution he could have been made to suffer. The Fates could have trapped him in a building collapse, perhaps quite accidentally, then left him there to await death – with its coming certainty a painful punishment.
Not him.
Nonius left. Erodion’s raggedy knock-kneed horse took him and a heavy cartload of plunder safely inland. Worse, far worse for those who like justice, Nonius was even at that stage planning to come back. Once the hot slurry cooled in the devastated town, Nonius would be there again. He would find his way amongst the buried buildings, remembering where the best homes were, digging down to salvage statues, stripping out expensive marble, grabbing any portable plunder that remained. Other looters would be killed by further building collapses, but not him.
For him, what did the future hold? One day a man of great wealth would turn up in another town, under another name. Even ‘Nonius’ had never been his own. He had been born somewhere north of Campania, making his way from one town and one scam to another, evading detection, escaping the law, ducking the authorities’ notice, playing the nobody; whenever he could no longer pull it off, he slickly moved on, like any corrupt crook with blood on his hands who never left a forwarding address. He had passed through one location after another, always slipping away at the right moment, until one day in Herculaneum he had seen a benefactor’s statue near the Suburban baths. Master of acquiring power by association, he stole the name as his own validation. On leaving Pompeii he would do the same again, ‘Nonius’ becoming ‘Holconius’.
‘Are you related?’
‘Distantly, I believe …’
He would not return to live amidst ruination. Economic blight never attracts such men. So, after making huge wealth, the compulsive survivor would head towards retirement elsewhere. He left the cart to disintegrate in someone else’s orchard. Towards Erodion’s horse he felt no gratitude; for the wheezing beast there was no rewarding pasture in its old age. He handed it in to a knacker’s yard. Still, rather than being worked to death by Nonius, that horse may have welcomed being turned into pies.
The man himself would live frugally, conserving his cash as those whose wealth does not reside in land tend to do, from fear it may slip from them. He had wondered whether to apply for land, when estates that had belonged to disappeared residents were officially redistributed. There was a killing to be made there, but with his instinct for self-preservation, Nonius/Holconius chose not to subject himself to the narrow-eyed stare of a commissioner sent by a hard-headed Flavian Emperor.
With old age, he would be
come known as a miser. The sparse number of slaves who cared for him would lead pitiful lives, beaten and barely kept alive. He would never try to bribe them into anything that passed for loyalty, even though he was terrified of being left alone. Suspicion of others’ motives would govern him. After all, he himself had lived as the worst of men, so he expected to be cheated.
But he would stick it out for years. When the time came to take to his bed finally, it would be nothing like the bed he had once shared with Larius Lollius. That had had uneven legs, hard slats for support, a lumpen, flea-ridden mattress, one thin pillow. The retirement bed of Nonius was to be a stately wide antique, with bronze fittings (stolen) and ivory inlays (bought with loot). His mattress would be well-corded and evenly stuffed with fine Campanian wool, his pillows made from softest down, his laundered sheets smooth and his coverlet embroidered.
Nonius would die in his sleep peacefully, there in his own bed.
Chapter 13
The next volcanic stage.
For others it had been different.
The peril that not even Nonius could have survived occurred close to midnight. That was when the vast cloud’s weight collapsed back into the volcano’s chamber. Super-heated material then churned with new energy into a different reaction. Mud and steam, heated to a primeval temperature, were sent rolling out of Vesuvius at ground level. The first surge headed straight for Herculaneum.
This was not a slow creep of lava, like those in other eruptions from milder mountains, that local people come to view as it gloops like red-hot porridge over slopes and fields. This was a devastating torrent that rushed at incredible speed, white-hot, yet not even a fireball for it contained too many compressed solids. The avalanche crashed into buildings, either smashing them apart or pouring through windows and doors to fix them in an eternal mould. It covered two miles from peak to coast in moments, destroying all. Battered and splintered material was caught up and carried. Where buildings spontaneously burst into flames, those flames were immediately smothered by rock, mud and detritus.
With the surge came heat. This heat was four times greater than that of boiling water. As it punched across the countryside it carbonised wood, cooked fat, evaporated moisture, desiccated bone. No living thing survived. Uprooted trees were swept away. Any cattle that had escaped previously were lost now. All the birdlife that Larius and other painters loved to portray perished, along with fish and shell-fish, snails, insects, worms, mice. The few people in their homes, the many collected on the beach all died there, and they died at once.
Out of doors, the soldier may have glimpsed the surge’s approach. He may have heard its roar approaching. Before he even gasped, that heat killed him. His corpse pitched forwards, face down, fracturing bones, while his skull split open as his brain boiled. Further along, Erodion’s wife Salvia fell dead on the beach too. Inside the boatsheds, the heat took everyone. Ollia, the watchful mother, opened her eyes instinctively as the noise exploded, yet she and her children took no last breath but were lost, while the sleeping still slept.
This death is terrible to us now. Then and there, nobody realised. No one felt terror or had time to panic. There were no cries. It came too fast for pain or understanding. They were gone. All gone.
So much physical rubble pushed across Herculaneum that the coastline permanently moved out more than a thousand yards. Meanwhile in the normally tideless bay, the sea behaved differently. Shocks deep under the ocean floor caused a great movement. Salt water was suddenly sucked out for a long distance, exposing the seabed, stranding marine life, revealing long-lost wrecks – and creating new ones. Silently, the same sea then gathered into a tall, swelling wave that moved at awesome speed as it returned again, thundered inland, then retreated to its natural place.
Captured in this was Vitalis. His labouring boat was tossed end to end, and everyone thrown out. Drowning is said to be an easy death. For those who have to endure it, it cannot be easy enough.
No one would know how many were lost in that most beautiful of bays. No one could count the people who drowned helplessly out there in the terrifying dark.
Larius would never learn that his decision to keep Marciana with him was as good as any he could have made. Oplontis was buried deep by that first pyroclastic flow, along with Herculaneum. The same unstoppable avalanche of molten mud and rock spread out over the near coast, with its immediate intolerable heat. Larius Lollius died with his eldest daughter almost at the same instant as his wife and other children. Like them, he never knew what happened.
A consequence of such intense heat, well known to firefighters, is that human tendons suddenly contract. In death by thermal heat, an involuntary spasm causes corpses to clench their fists and bring them up defensively. This might have pleased Larius. In his wry way, he would appreciate that when he was taken, he looked like somebody defying fate.
Chapter 14
Afterwards.
During that night, the cloud above Vesuvius rose up and collapsed repeatedly. Massive surges continued, six in all. Herculaneum was buried seventy-five feet deep. With the third or fourth surge, the direction changed; it became Pompeii’s turn. One pyroclastic flow reached the town’s walls, its molten contents swirling round them though not entering. Anyone who attempted to flee as the surge came towards them managed only yards. Anyone who had made it outside the gates, died there and was buried. Everyone left in the town was killed by heat.
The next flow surged right over the walls, on top of the dumped deposits of its predecessor. This one rolled through Pompeii, entering buildings where anybody who had remained there already lay dead.
Even when morning should have come, a cloud of utter blackness rolled out and smothered the whole area around the bay and inland, terrifying people. Although it was possible to survive, many begged for death to end their terror. Destruction continued around the coast to other towns such as Baiae and Stabiae, burying the fine holiday resorts that had once been beloved of the wealthy. Deep ash covered everything, as far as Surrentum and Misenum, and out to the islands. The effects went further. Dirt and atmospheric darkness easily reached Rome. Taken high into the skies and carried by the wind, spewed filth was to blight crops and cause pestilence in countries far from Italy. Traces would mark the ice at the earth’s poles.
But on the second day the eruption ended. Convulsions continued underground as the land settled, but the fiery chamber had completely emptied. Weak sunlight tried to break through a wan haze. Slowly the expelled material began to cool and harden. Its forlorn crackle could be heard, but otherwise there was silence. Nothing else moved.
People would come searching. There would be official and unofficial salvage through the ensuing centuries. Pompeii and Herculaneum might be lost to the memory for a time but they would be found again. From the best and worst motives, people would be drawn to the bay. Traces of the dead, material items, and surviving art would strike generations with curiosity, awe and excitement. Scientists of all disciplines would find work. Writers would speculate, salaciously or with compassion. Unthinking people, poorly inducted, might fail to show reverence. Many would not linger. Yet in those places where thousands of the dead once walked and some still lie, in Pompeii and Herculaneum, the tug of human suffering will always reach those who are open to feeling, those who possess imagination.
And – Larius was right, of course – painters would be drawn to that place where painting had once been so important, to capture the visual wonder of violent destruction and to suggest what it ought to say to us. As long as art exists, artists will collect their pigments and take up their best brushes to paint Vesuvius by Night.
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