Pompeii

by Harris, Robert

  ‘Where’s Corelia?’

  ‘Corelia?’ Ampliatus’s eyes were still alert for a potential deal. ‘You want Corelia? In exchange for the water?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘A marriage? I’m willing to consider it.’ He jerked his thumb. ‘She’s in there. But I’ll want my lawyers to draw up terms.’

  Attilius turned away and strode through the narrow entrance into the laconium. Seated on the stone benches around the small domed sweating room, lit by the torches in their iron holders on the wall, were Corelia, her mother and her brother. Opposite them were the steward, Scutarius, and the giant gatekeeper, Massavo. A second exit led to the caldarium. As the engineer came in, Corelia looked up.

  ‘We need to leave,’ he said. ‘Hurry. Everyone.’

  Ampliatus, at his back, blocked the door. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Nobody leaves. We’ve endured the worst. This isn’t the time to run. Remember the prophecy of the sibyl.’

  Attilius ignored him, directing his words to Corelia. She seemed paralysed with shock. ‘Listen. The falling rock is not the main danger. It’s when the fall stops that winds of fire travel down the mountain. I’ve seen them. Everything in their path is destroyed.’

  ‘No, no. We’re safer here than anywhere,’ insisted Ampliatus. ‘Believe me. The walls are three feet thick.’

  ‘Safe from heat in a sweating room?’ Attilius appealed to them all. ‘Don’t listen to him. If the hot cloud comes, this place will cook you like an oven. Corelia.’ He held out his hand to her. She glanced quickly towards Massavo. They were under guard, Attilius realised: the laconium was their prison cell.

  ‘Nobody is leaving,’ repeated Ampliatus. ‘Massavo!’

  Attilius seized Corelia’s wrist and tried to drag her towards the caldarium before Massavo had time to stop him, but the big man was too fast. He sprang to cover the exit and when Attilius attempted to shoulder him aside Massavo grabbed him by the throat with his forearm and dragged him back into the room. Attilius let go of Corelia and struggled to prise away the grip from his windpipe. Normally he could look after himself in a fight but not against an opponent of this size, not when his body was exhausted. He heard Ampliatus order Massavo to break his neck – ‘Break it like the chicken he is!’ – and then there was a whoosh of flame close to his ear and a scream of pain from Massavo. The arm released him. He saw Corelia with a torch clenched in both hands and Massavo on his knees. Ampliatus called her name, and there was something almost pleading in the way he said it, stretching out his hands to her. She whirled round, the fire streaking, and hurled the torch at her father, and then she was through the door and into the caldarium, shouting to Attilius to follow.

  He blundered after her, down the tunnel and into the brightness of the hot room, across the immaculately cleaned floor, past the slaves, out through the window, into the darkness, sinking into the stones. When they were halfway across the yard he looked back and he thought perhaps that her father had given up – he could see no signs of pursuit at first – but of course, in his madness, Ampliatus had not: he never would. The unmistakable bulk of Massavo appeared in the window with his master beside him and the light of the window quickly fragmented as torches were passed out to the slaves. A dozen men armed with brooms and shovels jumped out of the caldarium and began fanning out across the ground.

  It seemed to take an age of slipping and sliding to clamber back up on to the perimeter roof and drop down into the street. For an instant they must have been dimly visible on the roof – long enough, at least, for one of the slaves to see them and shout a warning. Attilius felt a sharp pain in his ankle as he landed. He took Corelia’s arm and limped a little way further up the hill and then they both drew back into the shadow of the wall as the torches of Ampliatus’s men appeared in the road behind them. Their line of escape to the Stabian Gate was cut off.

  He thought then that it was hopeless. They were trapped between two sets of fire – the flames of the torches and the flames on Vesuvius – and even as he looked wildly from one to the other he detected a faint gleam beginning to form in the same place high up on the mountain as before, where the surges had been born. An idea came to him in his desperation – absurd: he dismissed it – but it would not go away, and suddenly he wondered if it had not been in the back of his mind all along. What had he done, after all, except head towards Vesuvius while everyone else had either stayed put or run away – first along the coastal road from Stabiae to Pompeii, and then up the hill from the south of the city towards the north? Perhaps it had been waiting for him from the start: his destiny.

  He peered towards the mountain. No doubt about it. The worm of light was growing. He whispered to Corelia, ‘Can you run?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then run as you’ve never run before.’

  They edged out from the cover of the wall. Ampliatus’s men had their backs to them and were staring into the murk towards the Stabian Gate. He heard Ampliatus issuing more orders – ‘You two take the sidestreet, you three down the hill’ – and then there was nothing for it but to start thrashing their way through the pumice again. He had to grind his teeth against the agony in his leg and she was quicker than he was, as she had been when she had darted up the hill in Misenum, her skirts all gathered in one hand around her thighs, her long pale legs flashing in the dark. He stumbled after her, aware of fresh shouting from Ampliatus – ‘There they go! Follow me!’ – but when they reached the end of the block and he risked a glance over his shoulder he could only see one torch swaying after them. ‘Cowards!’ Ampliatus was shrieking. ‘What are you afraid of?’

  But it was obvious what had made them mutiny. The wave of fire was unmistakably sweeping down Vesuvius, growing by the instant, not in height but in breadth – roiling, gaseous, hotter than flame: white hot – only a madman would run towards it. Even Massavo would not follow his master now. People were abandoning their futile attempts to dig out their belongings and staggering down the hillside to escape it. Attilius felt the heat on his face. The scorching wind raised whirls of ash and debris. Corelia looked back at him but he urged her forward – against all instinct, against all sense, towards the mountain. They had passed another city block. There was only one to go. Ahead the glowing sky outlined the Vesuvius Gate.

  ‘Wait!’ Ampliatus shouted. ‘Corelia!’ But his voice was fainter, he was falling behind.

  Attilius reached the corner of the castellum aquae with his head lowered into the stinging wind, half-blinded by the dust, and pulled Corelia after him, down the narrow alley. Pumice had almost completely buried the door. Only a narrow triangle of wood was showing. He kicked it, hard, and at the third attempt, the lock gave way and pumice poured through the opening. He pushed her in and slid down after her into the pitch darkness. He could hear the water, groped towards it, felt the edge of the tank and clambered over it, up to his waist in water, pulled her after him, and fumbled around the edges of the mesh screen for the fastenings, found them, lifted away the grille. He steered Corelia into the mouth of the tunnel and squeezed in after her.

  ‘Move. As far up as you can go.’

  A roaring, like an avalanche. She could not have heard him. He could not hear himself. But she scrambled forward instinctively. He followed, putting his hands on her waist and squeezing hard, pressing her down to her knees, so that as much of her body should be immersed as possible. He threw himself upon her. They clung to one another in the water. And then there was only scalding heat and the stench of sulphur in the darkness of the aqueduct, directly beneath the city walls.

  Hora Altera

  [07:57 hours]

  ‘The human body cannot survive being in temperatures over 200 degrees centigrade for more than a few moments, especially in the fast moving current of a surge. Trying to breathe in the dense cloud of hot ash in the absence of oxygen would lead to unconsciousness in a few breaths, as well as causing severe burns to the respiratory tract . . . On the other hand, survival is possible in the more distal parts of a
surge if there is adequate shelter to protect against the surge flow and its high temperature, as well as the missiles (rocks, building materials) entrained in the moving cloud of material.’

  Encylopaedia of Volcanoes

  An incandescent sandstorm raced down the hill towards Ampliatus. Exposed walls sheared, roofs exploded, tiles and bricks, beams and stones and bodies flew at him and yet so slowly, as it seemed to him in that long moment before his death, that he could see them turning against the brilliance. And then the blast hit him, burst his ear drums, ignited his hair, blew his clothes and shoes off, and whirled him upside down, slamming him against the side of a building.

  He died in the instant it took the surge to reach the baths and shoot through the open windows, choking his wife who, obeying orders to the last, had remained in her place in the sweating room. It caught his son, who had broken free and was trying to reach the Temple of Isis. It lifted him off his feet, and then it overwhelmed the steward and the porter, Massavo, who were running down the street towards the Stabian Gate. It passed over the brothel, where the owner, Africanus, had returned to retrieve his takings, and where Zmyrina was hiding under Exomnius’s bed. It killed Brebix, who had gone to the gladiators’ school at the start of the eruption to be with his former comrades, and Musa and Corvinus, who had decided to stay with him, trusting to his local knowledge for protection. It even killed the faithful Polites, who had been sheltering in the harbour and who went back into the town to see if he could help Corelia. It killed more than two thousand in less than half a minute and it left their bodies arranged in a series of grotesque tableaux for posterity to gawp at.

  For although their hair and clothes burned briefly, these fires were quickly snuffed out by the lack of oxygen, and instead a muffling, six-foot tide of fine ash, travelling in the wake of the surge, flowed over the city, shrouding the landscape and moulding every detail of its fallen victims. This ash hardened. More pumice fell. In their snug cavities the bodies rotted, and with them, as the centuries passed, the memory that there had even been a city on this spot. Pompeii became a town of perfectly shaped hollow citizens – huddled together or lonely, their clothes blown off or lifted over their heads, grasping hopelessly for their favourite possessions or clutching nothing – vacuums suspended in mid-air at the level of their roofs.

  At Stabiae, the wind from the surge caught the makeshift shelter of the Minerva’s sail and lifted it clear of the beach. The people, exposed, could see the glowing cloud rolling over Pompeii and heading straight towards them.

  Everyone ran, Pomponianus and Popidius in the lead.

  They would have taken Pliny with them. Torquatus and Alexion had him by the arms and had raised him to his feet. But the admiral was finished with moving and when he told them, brusquely, to leave him and to save themselves, they knew he meant it. Alexion gathered up his notes and repeated his promise to deliver them to the old man’s nephew. Torquatus saluted. And then Pliny was alone.

  He had done all he could. He had timed the manifestation in all its stages. He had described its phases – column, cloud, storm, fire – and had exhausted his vocabulary in the process. He had lived a long life, had seen many things and now Nature had granted him this last insight into Her power. In these closing moments of his existence he continued to observe as keenly as he had when young – and what greater blessing could a man ask for than that?

  The line of light was very bright and yet filled with flickering shadows. What did they mean? He was still curious.

  Men mistook measurement for understanding. And they always had to put themselves at the centre of everything. That was their greatest conceit. The earth is becoming warmer – it must be our fault! The mountain is destroying us – we have not propitiated the gods! It rains too much, it rains too little – a comfort to think that these things are somehow connected to our behaviour, that if only we lived a little better, a little more frugally, our virtue would be rewarded. But here was Nature, sweeping toward him – unknowable, all-conquering, indifferent – and he saw in Her fires the futility of human pretensions.

  It was hard to breathe, or even to stand in the wind. The air was full of ash and grit and a terrible brilliance. He was choking, the pain across his chest was an iron band. He staggered backward.

  Face it, don’t give in.

  Face it, like a Roman.

  The tide engulfed him.

  For the rest of the day, the eruption continued, with fresh surges and loud explosions that rocked the ground. Towards the evening its force subsided and it started to rain. The water put out the fires and washed the ash from the air and drenched the drifting grey landscape of low dunes and hollows that had obliterated the fertile Pompeiian plain and the beautiful coast from Herculaneum to Stabiae. It filled the wells and replenished the springs and created the lines of new streams, meandering down towards the sea. The River Sarnus took a different course entirely.

  As the air cleared, Vesuvius reappeared, but its shape was completely altered. It no longer rose to a peak but to a hollow, as if a giant bite had been taken from its summit. A huge moon, reddened by dust, rose over an altered world.

  Pliny’s body was recovered from the beach – ‘he looked more asleep than dead’, according to his nephew – and carried back to Misenum, along with his observations. These subsequently proved so accurate that a new word entered the language of science: ‘Plinian’, to describe ‘a volcanic eruption in which a narrow blast of gas is ejected with great violence from a central vent to a height of several miles before it expands sideways’.

  The Aqua Augusta continued to flow, as she would for centuries to come.

  People who had fled from their homes on the eastern edges of the mountain began to make a cautious return before nightfall and many were the stories and rumours that circulated in the days that followed. A woman was said to have given birth to a baby made entirely of stone, and it was also observed that rocks had come to life and assumed human form. A plantation of trees that had been on one side of the road to Nola crossed to the other and bore a crop of mysterious green fruit which was said to cure every affliction, from worms to baldness.

  Miraculous, too, were the tales of survival. A blind slave was said to have found his way out of Pompeii and to have buried himself inside the belly of a dead horse on the highway to Stabiae, in that way escaping the heat and the rocks. Two beautiful, blond children – twins – were found wandering, unharmed, in robes of gold, without a graze on their bodies, and yet unable to speak: they were sent to Rome and taken into the household of the Emperor.

  Most persistent of all was the legend of a man and a woman who had emerged out of the earth itself at dusk on the day the eruption ended. They had tunnelled underground like moles, it was said, for several miles, all the way from Pompeii, and had come up where the ground was clear, drenched in the life-giving waters of a subterranean river, which had given them its sacred protection. They were reported to have been seen walking together in the direction of the coast, even as the sun fell over the shattered outline of Vesuvius and the familiar evening breeze from Capri stirred the rolling dunes of ash.

  But this particular story was generally considered far-fetched and was dismissed as a superstition by all sensible people.

  Acknowledgements

  ‘I have prefaced these volumes with the names of my authorities. I have done so because it is, in my opinion, a pleasant thing and one that shows an honourable modesty, to own up to those who were the means of one’s achievements . . .’

  Pliny, Natural History, Preface.

  I’m afraid I cannot claim, as Pliny did, to have consulted 2,000 volumes in the course of my researches. Nevertheless, this novel could not have been written without the scholarship of many others and, like Pliny, I believe it would be ‘a pleasant thing’ – for me, at least, if not necessarily for them – to list some of my sources.

  In addition to those works on volcanology cited in the text, I would like to acknowledge my debt to Jean-Pierre Adam (
Roman Building), Carlin A. Barton (Roman Honor), Mary Beagon (Roman Nature), Marcel Brion (Pompeii and Herculaneum), Lionel Casson (The Ancient Mariners), John D’Arms (Romans on the Bay of Naples), Joseph Jay Deiss (Herculaneum), George Hauck (The Aqueduct of Nemausus), John F. Healy (Pliny the Elder on Science and Technology), James Higginbotham (Piscinae), A. Trevor Hodge (Roman Aqueducts & Water Supply), Wilhelmina Feemster Jashemski (The Gardens of Pompeii), Willem Jongman (The Economy and Society of Pompeii), Ray Laurence (Roman Pompeii), Amedeo Maiuri (Pompeii), August Mau (Pompeii: Its Life and Art), David Moore (The Roman Pantheon), Salvatore Nappo (Pompeii: Guide to the Lost City), L. Richardson, Jr (Pompeii: An Architectural History), Chester G. Starr (The Roman Imperial Navy), Antonio Varone (Pompei, i misteri di una città sepolta), Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum) and Paul Zanker (Pompeii: Public and Private Life).

  The translations of Pliny, Seneca and Strabo are mostly drawn from the editions of their work published by the Loeb Classical Library. I made much use of the edition of Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture edited by Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe. The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, edited by Richard J. A. Talbert, helped bring Campania to life. The volcanological analysis of the eruption by Haraldur Sigurdsson, Stanford Cashdollar and Stephen R.J. Sparks in The American Journal of Archaeology (86: 39–51) was invaluable.

  I had the great pleasure of discussing the Romans on the Bay of Naples with John D’Arms, over dinner with his family in a suitably sweltering English garden, just before his death; I shall always remember his kindness and encouragement. Professor A. Trevor Hodge, whose pioneering work on the Roman aqueducts was crucial in visualising the Aqua Augusta, helpfully answered my inquiries. Professor Jasper Griffin’s support enabled me to use the library of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Dr Mary Beard, Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, read the manuscript before publication, and made many invaluable suggestions.