Pompeii

Ampliatus swept across the atrium toward the great front door. He gestured to Massavo to open it and stepped out onto the threshold. Perhaps a hundred people—“hispeople” was how he liked to think of them—were crowded into the street. He held up his arms for silence. “You all know who I am,” he shouted when the murmur of voices had died away, “and you all know you can trust me!”

“Why should we?” someone shouted from the back.

Ampliatus ignored him. “The water is running again! If you don’t believe me—like that insolent fellow there—go and look at the fountains and see for yourselves. The aqueduct is repaired! And later today, a wonderful prophecy, by the sibyl Biria Onomastia, will be made public. It will take more than a few trembles in the ground and one hot summer to frighten the colony of Pompeii!”

A few people cheered. Ampliatus beamed and waved. “Good day to you all, citizens! Let’s get back to business.Salve lucrum! Lucrum gaudium! ” He ducked back into the vestibule. “Throw them some money, Scutarius,” he hissed, still smiling at the mob. “Not too much, mind you. Enough for some wine for them all.”

He lingered long enough to hear the effects of his largesse, as the crowd struggled for the coins, then headed back toward the atrium, rubbing his hands with delight. The disappearance of Exomnius had jolted his equanimity, he would not deny it, but in less than a day he had dealt with the problem, the fountain looked to be running strongly, and if that young aquarius wasn’t dead yet he would be soon. A cause for celebration! From the drawing room came the sound of laughter and the clink of crystal glass. He was about to walk around the pool to join them when, at his feet, he noticed the body of the bird he had watched being killed. He prodded it with his toe, then stooped to pick it up. Its tiny body was still warm. A red cap, white cheeks, black-and-yellow wings. There was a bead of blood in its eye.

A goldfinch. Nothing to it but fluff and feathers. He weighed it in his hand for a moment, some dark thought moving in the back of his mind, then let it drop and quickly mounted the steps into the pillared garden of his old house. The cat saw him coming and darted out of sight behind a bush but Ampliatus was not interested in pursuing it. His eyes were fixed on the empty cage on Corelia’s balcony and the darkened, shuttered windows of her room. He bellowed, “Celsia!” and his wife came running. “Where’s Corelia?”

“She was ill. I let her sleep—”

“Get her! Now!” He shoved her in the direction of the staircase, turned, and hurried toward his study.

It wasn’t possible; she wouldn’t dare . . .

He knew there was something wrong the moment he picked up the lamp and took it over to his desk. It was an old trick, learned from his former master—a hair in the drawer to tell him if a curious hand had been meddling in his affairs—but it worked well enough, and he had let it be understood that he would crucify the slave who could not be trusted.

There was no hair. And when he opened the strongbox and took out the document case there were no papyri, either. He stood there like a fool, tipping up the emptycapsa and shaking it like a magician who has forgotten the rest of his trick, then hurled it across the room where it splintered against the wall. He ran out into the courtyard. His wife had opened Corelia’s shutters and was standing on the balcony, her hands pressed to her face.

Corelia had her back to the mountain as she came through the Vesuvius Gate and into the square beside the castellum aquae. The fountains had started to run again, but the flow was still weak and from this high vantage point it was possible to see that a dusty pall had formed over Pompeii, thrown up by the traffic in the waterless streets. The noise of activity rose as a general hum above the red roofs.

She had taken her time on the journey home, never once spurring her horse above walking pace as she skirted Vesuvius and crossed the plain. She saw no reason to speed up now. As she descended the hill toward the big crossroads, Polites plodding faithfully behind her, the blank walls of the houses seemed to rise on either side to enclose her like a prison. Places she had relished since childhood—the hidden pools and the scented flower gardens, the shops with their trinkets and fabrics, the theaters and the noisy bathhouses—were as dead to her now as ash. She noticed the angry, frustrated faces of the people at the fountains, jostling to jam their pots beneath the dribble of water, and she thought again of the aquarius. She wondered where he was and what he was doing. His story of his wife and child had haunted her all the way back to Pompeii.

She knew that he was right. Her fate was inescapable. She felt neither angry nor afraid anymore as she neared her father’s house, merely dead to it all—exhausted, filthy, thirsty. Perhaps this would be her life from now on, her body going through the routine motions of existence and her soul elsewhere, watchful and separate? She could see a crowd in the street up ahead, bigger than the usual collection of hangers-on who waited for hours for a word with her father. As she watched they seemed to break into some outlandish, ritualistic dance, leaping into the air with their arms outstretched, then dropping to their knees to scrabble on the stones. It took her a moment to realize that money had been thrown to them. That was typical of her father, she thought—the provincial caesar, trying to buy the affection of the mob, believing himself to be acting like an aristocrat, never recognizing his own puffed-up vulgarity.

Her contempt was suddenly greater than her hatred and it strengthened her courage. She led the way around to the back of the house, toward the stables, and at the sound of the hooves on the cobbles an elderly groom came out. He looked wide-eyed with surprise at her disheveled appearance, but she took no notice. She jumped down from the saddle and handed him the reins. “Thank you,” she said to Polites and then, to the groom, “See that this man is given food and drink.”

She passed quickly out of the glare of the street and into the gloom of the house, climbing the stairs from the slaves’ quarters. As she walked she drew the rolls of papyri from beneath her cloak. Marcus Attilius had told her to replace them in her father’s study and hope their removal had not been noticed. But she would not do that. She would give them to him herself. Even better, she would tell him where she had been. He would know that she had discovered the truth and then he could do to her what he pleased. She didn’t care. What could be worse than the fate he had already planned? You cannot punish the dead.

It was with the exhilaration of rebellion that she emerged through the curtain into the house of Popidius and walked toward the swimming pool that formed the heart of the villa. She heard voices to her right and saw in the drawing room her future husband and the magistrates of Pompeii. They turned to look at her at exactly the moment that her father, with her mother and brother behind him, appeared on the steps leading to their old home. Ampliatus saw what she was carrying and for one glorious instant she saw the panic in his face. He shouted at her—“Corelia!”—and started toward her, but she swerved away and ran into the drawing room, scattering his secrets across the table and over the carpet before he had a chance to stop her.

It seemed to the engineer that Vesuvius was playing a game with him, never coming any closer however hard he rode toward her. Only occasionally, when he looked back, shielding his eyes against the sun, did he realize how high he was climbing. Soon he had a clear view of Nola. The irrigated fields around it were like a clear green square, no larger than a doll’s handkerchief lying unfolded on the brown Campanian plain. And Nola itself, an old Samnite fortress, appeared no more formidable than a scattering of tiny children’s bricks dropped off the edge of the distant mountain range. The citizens would have their water back by now. The thought gave him fresh confidence.

He had deliberately aimed for the edge of the nearest white-gray streak and he reached it soon after the middle of the morning, at the point where the pastureland on the lower slopes ended and the forest began. He passed no living creature, neither man nor animal. The occasional farmhouse beside the track was deserted. He guessed everyone must have fled, either in the night when they heard the explosion or at first light, when they woke to this ghostly shrouding of ash. It lay on the ground, like a powdery snow, quite still, for there was not a breath of wind to disturb it. When he jumped down from his horse he raised a cloud that clung to his sweating legs. He scooped up a handful. It was odorless, fine-grained, warm from the sun. In the distant trees it covered the foliage exactly as would a light fall of snow.

He put a little in his pocket to take back to show the admiral, and drank some water, swilling the dry taste of the dust from his mouth. Looking down the slope he could see another rider, perhaps a mile away, also making steady progress toward this same spot, presumably led by a similar curiosity to discover what had happened. Attilius considered waiting for him, to exchange opinions, but decided against it. He wanted to press on. He spat out the water, remounted, and rode back across the flank of the mountain, away from the ash, to rejoin the track that led into the forest.

Once he was among the trees the woodland closed around him and quickly he lost all sense of his position. There was nothing for it but to follow the hunters’ track as it wound through the trees, over the dried-up beds of streams, meandering from side to side but always leading him higher. He dismounted to take a piss. Lizards rustled away among the dead leaves. He saw small red spiders and their fragile webs, hairy caterpillars the size of his forefinger. There were clumps of crimson berries that tasted sweet on his tongue. The vegetation was commonplace—alder, brambles, ivy. Torquatus, the captain of the liburnian, had been right, he thought: Vesuvius was easier to ascend than she looked, and when the streams were full there would be enough up here to eat and drink to sustain an army. He could readily imagine the Thracian gladiator, Spartacus, leading his followers along this very trail a century and a half before, climbing toward the sanctuary of the summit.

It took him perhaps another hour to pass through the forest. He had little sense of time. The sun was mostly hidden by the trees, falling in shafts through the thick canopy of leaves. The sky, broken into fragments by the foliage, formed a brilliant, shifting pattern of blue. The air was hot, fragrant with the scent of dried pine and herbs. Butterflies flitted among the trees. There was no noise except the occasional soft hooting of wood pigeons. Swaying in the saddle in the heat, he felt drowsy. His head nodded. Once he thought he heard a larger animal moving along the track behind him but when he stopped to listen the sound had gone. Soon afterward the forest began to thin. He came into a clearing.

And now it was as if Vesuvius had decided to play a different game. Having for hours never seemed to come any closer, suddenly the peak rose directly in front of him—a few hundred feet high, a steeper incline, mostly of rock, without sufficient soil to support much in the way of vegetation except for straggly bushes and plants with small yellow flowers. And it was exactly as the Greek writer had described: a black cap, long ago scorched by fire. In places, the rock bulged outward, almost as if it were being pushed up from beneath, sending small flurries of stones rattling down the slope. Further along the ridge, larger landslides had occurred. Huge boulders, the size of a man, had been sent crashing into the trees—and recently, by the look of them. Attilius remembered the reluctance of the men to leave Pompeii.“Giants have journeyed through the air, their voices like claps of thunder . . .” The sound must have carried for miles.

It was too steep a climb for his horse. He dismounted and found a shady spot where he could tie its reins to a tree. He scouted around for a stick and selected one about half as thick as his wrist—smooth, gray, long-dead—and with that to support his weight he set out to begin his final ascent.

The sun up here was merciless, the sky so bright it was almost white. He moved from rock to cindery rock in the suffocating heat and the air itself seemed to burn his lungs, a dry heat, like a blade withdrawn from a fire. No lizards underfoot here, no birds overhead—it was a climb directly into the sun. He could feel the heat through the soles of his shoes. He forced himself to press on, without looking back, until the ground ceased to rise and what was ahead of him was no longer black rock but blue sky. He clambered over the ridge and peered across the roof of the world.

The summit of Vesuvius was not the sharp peak that it had appeared from the base but a rough and circular plain, perhaps two hundred paces in diameter, a wilderness of black rock, with a few brownish patches of sickly vegetation that merely emphasized its deadness. Not only did it look to have been on fire in the past, as the Greek papyrus had said, but to be burning now. In at least three places thin columns of gray vapor were rising, fluttering and hissing in the silence. There was the same sour stench of sulfur that there had been in the pipes of the Villa Hortensia.This is the place,thought Attilius.This is the heart of the evil. He could sense something huge and malevolent. One could call it Vulcan or give it whatever name one liked. One could worship it as a god. But it was a tangible presence. He shuddered.

He kept close to the edge of the summit and began working his way around it, mesmerized to begin with by the sulfurous clouds that were whispering from the ground and then by the astonishing panoramas beyond the rim. Away to his right the bare rock ran down to the edge of the forest, and then there was nothing but an undulating green blanket. Torquatus had said that you could see for fifty miles, but to Attilius it seemed that the whole of Italy was spread beneath him. As he moved from north to west the Bay of Neapolis came into his vision. He could easily make out the promontory of Misenum and the islands off its point, and the imperial retreat of Capri, and beyond them, as sharp as a razor cut, the fine line where the deep blue of the sea met the paler blue of the sky. The water was still flecked by the waves he had noticed the night before—scudding waves on a windless sea—although now he thought about it perhaps therewas a breeze beginning to rise. He could feel it on his cheek: the one they called Caurus, blowing from the northwest, toward Pompeii, which appeared at his feet as no more than a sandy smudge set back from the coast. He imagined Corelia arriving there, utterly unreachable now, a dot within a dot, lost to him forever.

It made him feel light-headed simply to look at it, as if he were himself nothing but a speck of pollen that might be lifted at any moment by the hot air and blown into the blueness. He felt an overwhelming impulse to surrender to it—a yearning for that perfect blue oblivion so strong that he had to force himself to turn away. Shaken, he began to pick his way directly across the summit toward the other side, back to where he had started, keeping clear of the plumes of sulfur that seemed to be multiplying all around him. The ground was shaking, bulging. He wanted to get away now, as fast as he could. But the terrain was rough, with deep depressions on either side of his path—“cave-like pits of blackened rock,” as the Greek writer had said—and he had to watch where he put his feet. And it was because of this—because he had his head down—that he smelled the body before he saw it.

It stopped him in his tracks—a sweet and cloying stink that entered his mouth and nostrils and coated them with a greasy film. The stench was emanating from the large dust bowl straight ahead of him. It was perhaps six feet deep and thirty across, simmering like a cauldron in the haze of heat, and what was most awful, when he peered over the side, was that everything in it was dead: not just the man, who wore a white tunic and whose limbs were so purplish-black Attilius thought at first he was a Nubian, but other creatures—a snake, a large bird, a litter of small animals—all scattered in this pit of death. Even the vegetation was bleached and poisoned.

The corpse was lying at the bottom, on its side, with its arms flung out, a water gourd and a straw hat just beyond its reach, as if it had died straining for them. It must have lain out here for at least two weeks, putrefying in the heat. Yet the wonder was how much of it remained. It had not been attacked by insects or picked to the bone by birds and animals. No clouds of blowflies swarmed across its half-baked meat. Rather, its burned flesh appeared to have poisoned anything that had tried to feast on it.

He swallowed hard to keep back his vomit. He knew at once that it had to be Exomnius. He had been gone two weeks or more, and who else would have ventured up here in August? But how could he be sure? He had never met the man. Yet he was reluctant to venture down onto that carpet of death. He forced himself to squat close to the lip of the pit and squinted at the blackened face. He saw a row of grinning teeth, like pips in a burst fruit; a dull eye, half-closed, sighting along the length of the grasping arm. There was no sign of any wound. But then the whole body was a wound, bruised and suppurating. What could have killed him? Perhaps he had succumbed to the heat. Perhaps his heart had given out. Attilius leaned down further and tried to poke at it with his stick and immediately he felt himself begin to faint. Bright lights wove and danced before him and he almost toppled forward. He scrabbled with his hands in the dust and just managed to push himself back, gasping for breath.

“The afflatus of the tainted air near to the ground itself . . .”

His head was pounding. He threw up—a bitter, vile-tasting fluid—and was still coughing and spitting mucus when he heard, in front of him, the crack of dry vegetation being broken by a step. He looked up groggily. On the other side of the pit, no more than fifty paces away, a man was moving across the summit toward him. He thought at first it must be part of the visions induced by the tainted air and he stood with an effort, swaying drunkenly, blinking the sweat out of his eyes, trying to focus, but still the figure came on, framed by the hissing jets of sulfur, with the glint in his hand of a knife.

It was Corax.

Attilius was in no condition to fight. He would have run, but he could barely raise his feet.

The overseer approached the pit cautiously—crouched low, his arms spread wide, shifting lightly from foot to foot, reluctant to take his eyes off the engineer, as if he suspected a trick. He darted a quick glance at the body, frowned at Attilius, then looked back down again. He said softly, “So what’s all this then, pretty boy?” He sounded almost offended. He had planned his assault carefully, had traveled a long way to carry it out, had waited in the darkness for daylight and had followed his quarry at a distance—He must have been the horseman I saw behind me,thought Attilius—all the time relishing the prospect of revenge, only to have his plans thrown awry at the last moment. It was not fair, his expression said—another in the long series of obstacles that life had thrown in the way of Gavius Corax. “I asked you: what’s all this?”

Attilius tried to speak. His voice was thick and slurred. He wanted to say that Exomnius hadn’t been wrong, that there was terrible danger here, but he couldn’t pronounce the words. Corax was scowling at the corpse and shaking his head. “The stupid old bastard, climbing up here at his age! Worrying about the mountain. And for what? For nothing! Nothing—except landing us with you.” He returned his attention to Attilius. “Some clever young cunt from Rome, come to teach us all our jobs. Still fancy your chances, pretty boy? Nothing to say now, I notice. Well, why don’t I cut you another mouth and we’ll see what comes out of that?”

He hunched forward, tossing his knife from hand to hand, his face set and ready for the kill. He began to circle the pit and it was all Attilius could do to stumble in the opposite direction. When the overseer stopped, Attilius stopped, and when he reversed his steps and started prowling the other way, Attilius followed suit. This went on for a while, but the tactic obviously enraged Corax—“Fuck this,” he yelled, “I’m not playing your stupid games!”—and suddenly he made a rush at his prey. Red-faced, panting for breath in the heat, he ran down the side of the hollow and across it and had just reached the other slope when he stopped. He glanced down at his legs in surprise. With a terrible slowness he tried to wade forward, opening and shutting his mouth like a landed fish. He dropped his knife and sank to his knees, batting feebly at the air in front of him, then he crashed forward onto his face.

There was nothing that Attilius could do except watch him drown in the dry heat. Corax made a couple of feeble attempts to move, each time seeming to stretch for something beyond his reach, as Exomnius must have done. Then he gave up and quietly lay on his side. His breathing became more shallow, then stopped, but long before it ceased altogether Attilius had left him—stumbling across the bulging, trembling summit of the mountain, through the thickening plumes of sulfur, now flattened by the gathering breeze and pointing in the direction of Pompeii.

Down in the town, the light wind, arriving during the hottest part of the day, had come as a welcome relief. The Caurus raised tiny swirls of dust along the streets as they emptied for the siesta, fluttering the colored awnings of the bars and snack shops, stirring the foliage of the big plane trees close to the amphitheater. In the house of Popidius it ruffled the surface of the swimming pool. The little masks of dancing fauns and bacchantes hanging between the pillars stirred and chimed. One of the papyri lying on the carpet was caught by the gust and rolled toward the table. Holconius put out his foot to stop it.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Ampliatus was tempted to strike Corelia there and then but checked himself, sensing that it would somehow be her victory if he was to be seen beating her in public. His mind moved quickly. He knew all there was to know about power. He knew that there were times when it was wisest to keep your secrets close: to possess your knowledge privately, like a favorite lover, to be shared with no one. He also knew that there were times when secrets, carefully revealed, could act like hoops of steel, binding others to you. In a flash of inspiration he saw that this was one of those occasions.

“Read them,” he said. “I have nothing to hide from my friends.” He stooped and collected the papyri and piled them on the table.

“We should go,” said Brittius. He drained his glass of wine and began to rise to his feet.

“Read them!” commanded Ampliatus. The magistrate sat down sharply. “Forgive me. Please. I insist.” He smiled. “They come from the room of Exomnius. It’s time you knew. Help yourself to more wine. I shall only be a moment. Corelia, you will come with me.” He seized her by the elbow and steered her toward the steps. She dragged her feet but he was too strong for her. He was vaguely aware of his wife and son following. When they were out of sight, around the corner, in the pillared garden of their old house, he twisted her flesh between his fingers. “Did you really think,” he hissed, “that you could hurt me—a feeble girl like you?”

“No,” she said, wincing and wriggling to escape. “But at least I thought I could try.”

Her composure disconcerted him. “Oh?” He pulled her close to him. “And how did you propose to do that?”

“By showing the documents to the aquarius. By showing them to everyone. So that they could all see you for what you are.”

“And what is that?” Her face was very close to his.

“A thief. A murderer. Lower than aslave .”

She spat out the last word and he drew back his hand and this time he would certainly have hit her but Celsinus grabbed his wrist from behind.

“No, father,” he said. “We’ll have no more of that.”

For a moment, Ampliatus was too astonished to speak. “You?” he said. “You as well?” He shook his hand free and glared at his son. “Don’t you have some religious rite to go to? And you?” He wheeled on his wife. “Shouldn’t you be praying to the holy matron, Livia, for guidance? Ach,” he spat, “get out of my way, the pair of you.” He dragged Corelia along the path toward the staircase. The other two did not move. He turned and pushed her up the steps, along the passage, and into her room. She fell backward onto her bed. “Treacherous, ungrateful child!”

He looked around for something with which to punish her but all he could see were feeble, feminine possessions, neatly arranged—an ivory comb, a silk shawl, a parasol, strings of beads—and a few old toys that had been saved to be offered to Venus before her wedding. Propped in a corner was a wooden doll with movable limbs he had bought her for her birthday years ago and the sight of it jolted him. What had happened to her? He had loved her so much—his little girl!—how had it come to hatred? He was suddenly baffled. Had he not done everything, built all this, raised himself out of the muck, for the sake of her and her brother? He stood panting, defeated, as she glared at him from the bed. He didn’t know what to say. “You’ll stay in here,” he finished lamely, “until I’ve decided what should be done with you.” He went out, locking the door behind him.

His wife and son had left the garden.Typical, feeble rebels, he thought,melting away when my back is turned. Corelia had always had more balls than the rest of them put together. His little girl! In the drawing room the magistrates were leaning forward across the table, muttering. They fell silent as he approached and turned to watch him as he headed toward the sideboard and poured himself some wine. The lip of the decanter rattled against the glass. Was his hand shaking? He examined it, front and back. This wasn’t like him: it looked steady enough. He felt better after draining the glass. He poured himself another, fixed a smile, and faced the magistrates.

“Well?”

It was Holconius who spoke first. “Where did you get these?”

“Corax, the overseer on the Augusta, brought them around to me yesterday afternoon. He found them in Exomnius’s room.”

“You mean he stole them?”

“Found, stole—” Ampliatus fluttered his hand.

“This should have been brought to our attention immediately.”

“And why’s that, your honors?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” cut in Popidius excitedly. “Exomnius believed there was about to be another great earthquake!”

“Calm yourself, Popidius. You’ve been whining about earthquakes for seventeen years. I wouldn’t take all that stuff seriously.”

“Exomnius took it seriously.”

“Exomnius!” Ampliatus looked at him with contempt. “Exomnius always was a bag of nerves.”

“Maybe so. But why was he having documents copied? This in particular. What do you think he wanted with this?” He waved one of the papyri.

Ampliatus glanced at it and took another gulp of wine. “It’s in Greek. I don’t read Greek. You forget, Popidius: I haven’t had the benefit of your education.”

“Well, I do read Greek, and I believe I recognize this. I think this is the work of Strabo, the geographer, who traveled these parts in the time of the Divine Augustus. He writes here of a summit that is flat and barren and has been on fire in the past. Surely that must be Vesuvius? He says the fertile soil around Pompeii reminds him of Caetana, where the land is covered with ash thrown up by the flames of Etna.”

“So what?”

“Wasn’t Exomnius Sicilian?” demanded Holconius. “What town was he from?”

Ampliatus waved his glass dismissively. “I believe Caetana. But what of it?”I must learn the rudiments of Greek, he thought. If a fool like Popidius could master it, anyone could.

“As for this Latin document—this I certainly recognize,” continued Popidius. “It’s part of a book, and I know both the man who wrote it and the man to whom the passage is addressed. It’s by Annaeus Seneca—Nero’s mentor. Surely evenyou must have heard of him?”

Ampliatus flushed. “My business is building, not books.” Why were they going on about all this stuff?

“The Lucilius to whom he refers is Lucilius Junior, a native of this very city. He had a house near the theater. He was a procurator overseas—in Sicily, as I remember it. Seneca is describing the great Campanian earthquake. It’s from his bookNatural Questions . I believe there is even a copy in our own library on the forum. It lays out the foundations of the Stoic philosophy.”

“ ‘The Stoic philosophy’!” mocked Ampliatus. “And what would old Exomnius have been doing with ‘the Stoic philosophy’?”

“Again,” repeated Popidius, with mounting exasperation, “isn’t it obvious?” He laid the two documents side by side. “Exomnius believed there was a link, you see?” He gestured from one to the other. “Etna and Vesuvius. The fertility of the land around Caetana and the land around Pompeii. The terrible omens of seventeen years ago—the poisoning of the sheep—and the omens all around us this summer. He was from Sicily. He saw signs of danger. And now he’s disappeared.”

Nobody spoke for a while. The effigies around the pool tinkled in the breeze.

Brittius said, “I think these documents ought to be considered by a full meeting of the Ordo. As soon as possible.”

“No,” said Ampliatus.

“But the Ordo is the ruling council of the town! They have a right to be informed!”

“No!” Ampliatus was emphatic. “How many citizens are members of the Ordo?”

“Eighty-five,” said Holconius.

“There you are. It will be all over town within an hour. Do you want to start a panic, just as we’re starting to get back on our feet? When we’ve got the prophecy of the sibyl to give them, to keep them sweet? Remember who voted for you, your honors—the traders. They won’t thank you for scaring their business away. You saw what happened this morning, simply because the fountains stopped for a few hours. Besides, what does this add up to? So Exomnius was worried about earth tremors? So Campania has ashy soil like Sicily, and stinking fumaroles? So what? Fumaroles have been part of life on the bay since the days of Romulus.” He could see his words were striking home. “Besides, this isn’t the real problem.”

Holconius said, “And what is the real problem?”

“The other documents—the ones that show how much Exomnius was paid to give this town cheap water.”

Holconius said quickly, “Have a care, Ampliatus. Your little arrangements are no concern of ours.”

“Mylittle arrangements!” Ampliatus laughed. “That’s a good one!” He set down his glass and lifted the decanter to pour himself another drink. Again, the heavy crystal rattled. He was becoming light-headed but he didn’t care. “Come now, your honors, don’t pretend you didn’t know! How do you think this town revived so quickly after the earthquake? I’ve saved you a fortune by my ‘little arrangements.’ Yes, and helped make myself one into the bargain—I don’t deny it. But you wouldn’t be here without me! Your precious baths, Popidius, where Brittius here likes to be wanked off by his little boys—how much do you pay for them? Nothing! And you, Cuspius, with your fountains. And you, Holconius, with your pool. And all the private baths and the watered gardens and the big public pool in the palaestra and the pipes in the new apartments! This town has been kept afloat for more than a decade by my little arrangement with Exomnius. And now some nosy bastard of an aquarius from Rome has got to hear about it.That’s the real problem.”

“An outrage!” said Brittius, his voice quivering. “An outrage—to be spoken to in such a way by this upstart slave.”

“Upstart, am I? I wasn’t such an upstart when I paid for the games that secured your election, Brittius. ‘Cold steel, no quarter, and the slaughterhouse right in the middle where all the stands can see it’—that’s what you asked for, and that was what I gave.”

Holconius raised his hands. “All right, gentlemen. Let’s keep calm.”

Cuspius said, “But surely we can just cut a deal with this new aquarius, like the one you had with the other fellow?”

“It seems not. I dropped a hint yesterday but all he did was look at me as if I’d just put my hand on his cock. I felt insulted for my generosity. No, I’m afraid I recognize his type. He’ll take this up in Rome, they’ll check the accounts, and we’ll have an imperial commission down here before year’s end.”

“Then what are we to do?” said Popidius. “If this comes out, it will look bad for all of us.”

Ampliatus smiled at him over the rim of his glass. “Don’t worry. I’ve sorted it out.”

“How?”

“Popidius!” cautioned Holconius quickly. “Take care.”

Ampliatus paused. They didn’t want to know. They were the magistrates of the town, after all. The innocence of ignorance—that was what they craved. But why should they have peace of mind? He would dip their hands in the blood along with his own.

“He’ll go to meet his ancestors.” He looked around. “Before he gets back to Misenum. An accident out in the countryside. Does anyone disagree? Speak up if you do. Popidius? Holconius? Brittius? Cuspius?” He waited. It was all a charade. The aquarius would be dead by now, whatever they said: Corax had been itching to slit his throat. “I’ll take that as agreement. Shall we drink to it?”

He reached for the decanter but stopped, his hand poised in midair. The heavy crystal glass was not merely shaking now: it was moving sideways along the polished wooden surface. He frowned at it stupidly. That couldn’t be right. Even so, it reached the end of the sideboard and crashed to the floor. He glanced at the tiles. There was a vibration beneath his feet. It gradually built in strength and then a gust of hot air passed through the house, powerful enough to bang the shutters. An instant later, far away—but very distinctly, unlike anything that he, or anyone else, had ever heard—came the sound of a double boom.

HORA SEXTA

[12:57 hours]

The surface of the volcano ruptured shortly after noon allowing explosive decompression of the main magma body. . . . The exit velocity of the magma was approximately 1,440 km per hour (Mach 1). Convection carried incandescent gas and pumice clasts to a height of 28 km.

Overall, the thermal energy liberated during the course of the entire eruption may be calculated using the following formula:

Eth=V * d * T * K

where Eth is in joules, V is the volume in cubic km, d is specific

gravity (1.0), T is the temperature of the ejecta (500 degrees centigrade), and K is a constant including the specific heat of the magma and the mechanical equivalent of heat (8.37 x 10¹⁴).

Thus the thermal energy released during theA.D . 79 eruption

would have been roughly 2 x 10¹⁸joules—or about

100,000 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

—DYNAMICS OF VOLCANISM

Afterward, whenever they compared their stories, the survivors would always wonder at how different the moment had sounded to each of them. A hundred twenty miles away in Rome it was heard as a thud, as if a heavy statue or a tree had toppled. Those who escaped from Pompeii, which was five miles downwind, always swore they had heard two sharp bangs, whereas in Capua, some twenty miles distant, the noise from the start was a continuous, tearing crack of thunder. But in Misenum, which was closer than Capua, there was no sound at all, only the sudden appearance of a narrow column of brown debris fountaining silently into the cloudless sky.

For Attilius, it was like a great, dry wave that came crashing over his head. He was roughly two miles clear of the summit, following another old hunting trail through the forest, descending fast on horseback along the mountain’s western flank. The effects of the poisoning had shrunk to a small fist of pain hammering behind his eyes and in place of the drowsiness everything seemed oddly sharpened and heightened. He had no doubt of what was coming. His plan was to pick up the coastal road at Herculaneum and ride directly to Misenum to warn the admiral. He reckoned he would be there by midafternoon. The bay sparkled in the sunlight between the trees, close enough for him to be able to make out individual lines of surf. He was noticing the glistening pattern of spiderwebs hanging loosely in the foliage and a particular cloud of midges, swirling beneath a branch ahead of him, when suddenly they disappeared.

The shock of the blast struck him from behind and knocked him forward. Hot air, like the opening of a furnace door. Then something seemed to pop in his ears and the world became a soundless place of bending trees and whirling leaves. His horse stumbled and almost fell and he clung to its neck as they plunged down the path, both of them riding the crest of the scalding wave and then abruptly it was gone. The trees sprang upright, the debris settled, the air became breathable again. He tried to talk to the horse but he had no voice and when he looked back toward the top of the mountain he saw that it had vanished and in its place a boiling stem of rock and earth was shooting upward.

From Pompeii it looked as if a sturdy brown arm had punched through the peak and was aiming to smash a hole in the roof of the sky—bang, bang:that double crack—and then a hard-edged rumble, unlike any other sound in nature, that came rolling across the plain. Ampliatus ran outside with the magistrates. From the bakery next door and all the way up the street people were emerging to stare at Vesuvius, shielding their eyes, their faces turned toward this new dark sun rising in the north on its thundering plinth of rock. There were a couple of screams but no general panic. It was still too early, the thing was too awesome—too strange and remote—for it to be perceived as an immediate threat.

It will stop at any moment,Ampliatus thought. He willed it to do so.Let it subside now, and the situation will still be controllable. He had the nerve, the force of character; it was all a question of presentation. He could handle even this: “The gods have given us a sign, citizens! Let us heed their instruction! Let us build a great column, in imitation of this celestial inspiration! We live in a favored spot!” But the thing did not stop. Up and up it went. A thousand heads tilted backward as one to follow its trajectory and gradually the isolated screams became more widespread. The pillar, narrow at its base, was broadening as it rose, its apex flattening out across the sky.

Someone shouted that the wind was carrying it their way.

That was the moment at which he knew he would lose them. The mob had a few simple instincts—greed, lust, cruelty—and he could play them like the strings of a harp because he was of the mob and the mob was him. But shrill fear drowned out every other note. Still, he tried. He stepped into the center of the street and held his arms out wide. “Wait!” he shouted. “Cuspius, Brittius—all of you—link hands with me! Set them an example!”

The cowards didn’t even look at him. Holconius broke first, jamming his bony elbows into the press of bodies to force his way down the hill. Brittius followed, and then Cuspius. Popidius turned tail and darted back inside the house. Up ahead, the crowd had become a solid mass as people streamed from the side streets to join it. Its back was to the mountain now, its face was to the sea, its only instinct: flight. Ampliatus had a final glimpse of his wife’s white face in the doorway and then he was engulfed by the stampeding crowd, spun like one of the revolving wooden models they used for practice in the gladiatorial school. He was thrown sideways, winded, and would have disappeared beneath their feet if Massavo had not seen him fall and scooped him up to safety on the step. He saw a mother drop her baby and heard its screams as it was trampled, saw an elderly matron slammed headfirst against the opposite wall then slip, unconscious, out of sight, as the mob swept on regardless. Some screamed. Some sobbed. Most were tight-mouthed, intent on saving their strength for the battle at the bottom of the hill, where they would have to fight their way through the Stabian Gate.

Ampliatus, leaning against the doorjamb, was aware of a wetness on his face and when he dabbed the back of his hand to his nose it came away smeared in blood. He looked above the heads of the crowd toward the mountain but already it had disappeared. A vast black wall of cloud was advancing toward the city, as dark as a storm. But it was not a storm, he realized, and it was not a cloud; it was a thundering waterfall of rock. He looked quickly in the other direction. He still had his gold-and-crimson cruiser moored down in the harbor. They could put to sea, try to head to the villa in Misenum, seek shelter there. But the cram of bodies in the street leading to the gate was beginning to stretch back up the hill. He would never reach the port. And even if he did, the crew would be scrambling to save themselves.

His decision was made for him.And so be it, he thought. This was exactly how it had been seventeen years ago. The cowards had fled, he had stayed, and then they had all come crawling back again! He felt his old energy and confidence returning. Once more the former slave would give his masters a lesson in Roman courage. The sibyl was never wrong. He gave a final, contemptuous glance to the river of panic streaming past him, stepped back, and ordered Massavo to close the door. Close it and bolt it. They would stay, and they would endure.

In Misenum it looked like smoke. Pliny’s sister, Julia, strolling on the terrace with her parasol, picking the last of the summer roses for the dinner table, assumed it must be another of the hillside fires that had plagued the bay all summer. But the height of the cloud, its bulk, and the speed of its ascent were like nothing she had ever seen. She decided she had better wake her brother, who was dozing over his books in the garden below.

Even in the heavy shade of the tree his face was as scarlet as the flowers in her basket. She hesitated to disturb him, because of course he would immediately start to get excited. He reminded her of how their father had been in the days before his death—the same corpulence, the same shortness of breath, the same uncharacteristic irritability. But if she let him sleep he would no doubt be even more furious to have missed the peculiar smoke, so she stroked his hair and whispered, “Brother, wake up. There is something you will want to see.”

He opened his eyes at once. “The water—is it flowing?”

“No. Not the water. It looks like a great fire on the bay, coming from Vesuvius.”

“Vesuvius?” He blinked at her, then shouted to a nearby slave. “My shoes! Quickly!”

“Now, brother, don’t exert yourself too much—”

He didn’t even wait for his shoes. Instead, for the second time that day, he set off barefoot, lumbering across the dry grass toward the terrace. By the time he reached it most of the household slaves were lining the balustrade, looking east across the bay toward what seemed like a gigantic umbrella pine made of smoke growing over the coast. A thick brown trunk, with black-and-white blotches, was rolling miles into the air, sprouting at its crown a clump of feathery branches. These broad leaves seemed in turn to be dissolving along their lower edges, beginning to rain a fine, sand-colored mist back down to earth.

It was an axiom of the admiral’s, one he was fond of repeating, that the more he observed nature, the less prone he was to consider any statement about her to be impossible. But surely thiswas impossible. Nothing he had read of—and he had read everything—came close to matching this spectacle. Perhaps nature was granting him the privilege of witnessing something never before recorded in history? Those long years of accumulating facts, the prayer with which he had ended theNatural History —“Hail Nature, mother of all creation, and mindful that I alone of the men of Rome have praised thee in all thy manifestations, be gracious toward me”—was it all being rewarded at last? If he had not been so fat he would have fallen to his knees. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

He must start work at once.Umbrella pine . . . tall stem . . . feathery branches . . . He needed to get all this down for posterity while the images were still fresh in his head. He shouted to Alexion to collect pen and papyrus and to Julia to fetch Gaius.

“He’s inside, working on the translation you gave him.”

“Well, tell him to come out here at once. He won’t want to miss this.”It can’t be smoke, he thought. It was too thick. Besides, there was no sign of any fire at the base. But if not smoke, what? “Be quiet, damn you!” He waved at the slaves to stop their jabbering. Listening hard, it was just possible to make out a low and ceaseless rumble carrying across the bay. If that was how it sounded at a distance of fifteen miles, what must it be like close-up?

He beckoned to Alcman. “Send a runner down to the naval school to find the flagship captain. Tell him I want a liburnian made ready and put at my disposal.”

“Brother—no!”

“Julia!” He held up his hand. “You mean well, I know, but save your breath. This phenomenon, whatever it is, is a sign from nature. This ismine. ”

Corelia had thrown open her shutters and was standing on the balcony. To her right, above the flat roof of the atrium, a gigantic cloud was advancing, as black as ink, like a heavy curtain being drawn across the sky. The air was shaking with thunder. She could hear screams from the street. In the courtyard garden slaves ran back and forth to no apparent purpose. They reminded her of dormice in a jar before they were fished out for cooking. She felt somehow detached from the scene—a spectator at the back of a theater, watching an elaborate production. At any moment, a god would be lowered from the wings to whisk her off to safety. She shouted down—“What’s happening?”—but nobody paid her any attention. She tried again and realized she had been forgotten.

The drumming of the cloud was getting louder. She ran to the door and tried to open it but the lock was too strong to break. She ran back onto the balcony but it was too high to jump. Below, and to the left, she saw Popidius coming up the steps from his part of the house, shepherding his elderly mother, Taedia Secunda, before him. A couple of their slaves, laden with bags, were following behind. She screamed at him—“Popidius!”—and at the sound of his name he stopped and glanced around. She waved to him. “Help me! He’s locked me in!”

He shook his head in despair. “He’s trying to lock us all in! He’s gone mad!”

“Please—come up and open the door!”

He hesitated. He wanted to help her. And he would have done so. But even as he took half a pace toward her something hit the tiled roof behind him and bounced off into the garden. A light stone, the size of a child’s fist. He saw it land. Another struck the pergola. And suddenly it was dusk and the air was full of missiles. He was being hit repeatedly on the head and shoulders. Frothy rocks, they looked to be: a whitish petrified sponge. They weren’t heavy but they stung. It was like being caught in a sudden hailstorm—a warm, dark, dry hailstorm, if such a thing were imaginable. He ran for the cover of the atrium, ignoring Corelia’s cries, pushing his mother in front of him. The door ahead—Ampliatus’s old entrance—was hanging open and he stumbled out into the street.

Corelia did not see him go. She ducked back into her room to escape the bombardment. She had one last impression of the world outside, shadowy in the dust, and then all light was extinguished and there was nothing in the pitch darkness, not even a scream, only the roaring waterfall of rock.

In Herculaneum life was peculiarly normal. The sun was shining, the sky and sea were a brilliant blue. As Attilius reached the coastal road he could even see fishermen out in their boats casting their nets. It was like some trick of the summer weather by which half of the bay was lost from view in a violent storm while the other half blessed its good fortune and continued to enjoy the day. Even the noise from the mountain seemed unthreatening—a background rumble, drifting with the veil of debris toward the peninsula of Surrentum.

Outside the town gates of Herculaneum a small crowd had gathered to watch the proceedings, and a couple of enterprising traders were setting up stalls to sell pastries and wine. A line of dusty travelers was already plodding down the road, mostly on foot and carrying luggage, some with carts piled high with their belongings. Children ran along behind them, enjoying the adventure, but the faces of their parents were rigid with fear. Attilius felt as if he were in a dream. A fat man, his mouth full of cake, sitting on a milestone, called out cheerfully to ask what it was like back there.

“As black as midnight in Oplontis,” someone replied, “and Pompeii must be even worse.”

“Pompeii?” said Attilius sharply. That woke him up. “What’s happening in Pompeii?”

The traveler shook his head, drawing his finger across his throat, and Attilius recoiled, remembering Corelia. When he had forced her to leave the aqueduct he had thought he was sending her out of harm’s way. But now, as his eye followed the curve of the road toward Pompeii, to the point where it disappeared into the murk, he realized he had done the opposite. The outpouring of Vesuvius, caught by the wind, was blowing directly over the town.

“Don’t go that way, citizen,” warned the man, “there’s no way through.”

But Attilius was already turning his horse to face the stream of refugees.

The farther he went the more clogged the road became, and the more pitiful the state of the fleeing population. Most were coated in a thick gray dust, their hair frosted, their faces like death masks, spattered with blood. Some carried torches, still lit: a defeated army of whitened old men, of ghosts, trudging away from a calamitous defeat, unable even to speak. Their animals—oxen, asses, horses, dogs, and cats—

resembled alabaster figures come creakingly to life. Behind them on the highway they left a trail of ashy wheelmarks and footprints.

On one side of him, isolated crashes came from the olive groves. On the other, the sea seemed to be coming to the boil in a myriad tiny fountains. There was a clatter of stones on the road ahead. His horse stopped, lowered its head, refused to move. Suddenly the edge of the cloud, which had seemed to be almost half a mile away, appeared to come rushing toward them. The sky was dark and whirling with tiny projectiles and in an instant the day passed from afternoon sun to twilight and he was under bombardment. Not hard stones but white clinker, small clumps of solidified ash, falling from some tremendous height. They bounced off his head and shoulders. People and wagons loomed out of the half-light. Women screamed. Torches dimmed in the darkness. His horse shied and turned. Attilius ceased to be a rescuer and became just another part of the panicking stream of refugees, frantically trying to outrun the storm of debris. His horse slipped down the side of the road into the ditch and cantered along it. Then the air lightened, became brownish, and they burst back into the sunshine.

Everyone was hurrying now, galvanized by the threat at their backs. Not only was the road to Pompeii impassable, Attilius realized, but a slight shift in the wind was spreading the danger westward around the bay. An elderly couple sat weeping beside the road, too exhausted to run any farther. A cart had overturned and a man was desperately trying to right it, while his wife soothed a baby and a little girl clung to her skirts. The fleeing column streamed around them and Attilius was carried in the flow, borne back along the road toward Herculaneum.

The shifting position of the wall of falling rock had been noticed at the city gates and by the time he reached them the traders were hastily packing away their goods. The crowd was breaking up, some heading for shelter in the town, others pouring out of it to join the exodus on the road. And still, amid all this, Attilius could see across the red-tiled roofs the normality of the fishermen on the bay and, farther out, the big grain ships from Egypt steering toward the docks at Puteoli.The sea, he thought: if he could somehow launch a boat, it might just be possible to skirt the downpour of stones and approach Pompeii from the south—by sea. He guessed it would be useless to try to fight his way down to the waterfront in Herculaneum, but the great villa just outside it—the home of the senator, Pedius Cascus, with his troop of philosophers—perhaps they might have a vessel he could use.

He rode a little farther along the crowded highway until he came to a high pair of gateposts that he judged must belong to the Villa Calpurnia. He tied his horse to a railing in the courtyard and looked around for any sign of life, but the enormous palace seemed to be deserted. He walked through the open door into the grand atrium, and then along the side of an enclosed garden. He could hear shouts, footsteps running along the marble corridors, and then a slave appeared around a corner pushing a wheelbarrow stacked high with rolls of papyrus. He ignored Attilius’s command to stop and headed through a wide doorway into the brilliant afternoon light, as another slave, also pushing a wheelbarrow—this one empty—hurried through the entrance and into the house. The engineer blocked his path.

“Where’s the senator?”

“He’s in Rome.” The slave was young, terrified, sweating.

“Your mistress?”

“Beside the pool. Please—let me pass.”

Attilius moved aside to let him go and ran out into the sun. Beneath the terrace was the huge pool he had seen from the liburnian on his voyage to Pompeii and all around it were people: dozens of slaves and white-robed scholars hurrying back and forth ferrying armfuls of papyri, stacking them into boxes at the water’s edge, while a group of women stood to one side, staring along the coast toward the distant storm, which looked from here like an immense brown sea fog. The craft offshore from Herculaneum were mere twigs against it. The fishing had stopped. The waves were rising. Attilius could hear them crashing against the shore in quick succession; no sooner had one broken than another came in on top of it. Some of the women were wailing, but the elderly matron in the center of the group, in a dark-blue dress, seemed calm as he approached her. He remembered her—the woman with the necklace of giant pearls.

“Are you the wife of Pedius Cascus?”

She nodded.

“Marcus Attilius. Imperial engineer. I met your husband two nights ago, at the admiral’s villa.”

She looked at him eagerly. “Has Pliny sent you?”

“No. I came to beg a favor. To ask for a boat.”

Her face fell. “Do you think if I had a boat I would be standing here? My husband took it yesterday to Rome.”

Attilius looked around the vast palace, at its statues and gardens, at the art treasures and books being piled up on the lawns. He turned to go.

“Wait!” She called after him. “You must help us.”

“There’s nothing I can do. You’ll have to take your chance on the road with the rest.”

“I’m not afraid for myself. But the library—we must rescue the library. There are too many books to move by road.”

“My concern is for people, not books.”

“People perish. Books are immortal.”

“Then if books are immortal, they will survive without my assistance.”

He began climbing the path back up toward the house.

“Wait!” She gathered her skirts and ran after him. “Where are you going?”

“To find a boat.”

“Pliny has boats. Pliny has the greatest fleet in the world at his command.”

“Pliny is on the other side of the bay.”

“Look across the sea! An entire mountain is threatening to descend on us! Do you think one man in one little boat can do anything? We need a fleet. Come with me!”

He would say this for her: she had the willpower of any man. He followed her around the pillared walkway surrounding the pool, up a flight of steps, and into a library. Most of the compartments had been stripped bare. A couple of slaves were loading what remained into a wheelbarrow. Marble heads of ancient philosophers looked down, dumbstruck at what was happening.

“This was where we kept the volumes that my ancestors brought back from Greece. One hundred twenty plays by Sophocles alone. All the works of Aristotle, some in his own hand. They are irreplaceable. We have never allowed them to be copied.” She gripped his arm. “Men are born and die by the thousand every hour. What do we matter? These great works are all that will be left of us. Pliny will understand.” She sat at the small table, took up a pen, and dipped it in an ornate brass inkstand. A red candle flickered beside her. “Take him this letter. He knows this library. Tell him Rectina pleads with him for rescue.”

Behind her, across the terrace, Attilius could see the ominous darkness moving steadily around the bay, like the shadow on a sundial. He had thought it might diminish but if anything the force of it was intensifying. She was right. It would take big ships—warships—to make any impression against an enemy on this scale. She rolled the letter and sealed it with the dripping candle, pressing her ring into the soft wax. “You have a horse?”

“I’d go faster with a fresh one.”

“You’ll have it.” She called to one of the slaves. “Take Marcus Attilius to the stables and saddle the swiftest horse we have.” She gave him the letter and, as he took it, clasped her dry and bony fingers around his wrist. “Don’t fail me, engineer.”

He pulled his hand free and ran after the slave.

HORA NONA

[15:32 hours]

The effect of the sudden release of huge volumes of magma can

alter the geometry of the plumbing system, destabilize the shallow

reservoir, and induce structural collapse. Such a situation frequently increases the eruption intensity, inducing contact between phreatic

fluids and magma, as well as explosive decompression of the

hydrothermal system associated with the shallow reservoir.

—ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VOLCANOES

It took Attilius just under two hours of hard riding to reach Misenum. The road wound along the coastline, sometimes running directly beside the water’s edge, sometimes climbing higher inland, past the immense villas of the Roman elite. All the way along it he passed small groups of spectators gathered at the edge of the highway to watch the distant phenomenon. He mostly had his back to the mountain, but when he rounded the northern edge of the bay and began to descend toward Neapolis, he could see it again, away to his left—a thing of extraordinary beauty now. A delicate veil of white mist had draped itself around the central column, rising for mile after mile in a perfect translucent cylinder, reaching up to brush the lower edge of the mushroom-shaped cloud that was toppling over the bay.

There was no sense of panic in Neapolis, a sleepy place at the best of times. He had far outpaced the weary, laden refugees emerging from beneath the hail of rock and no word of the catastrophe enveloping Pompeii had yet reached the city. The Greek-style temples and theaters facing out to sea gleamed white in the afternoon sun. Tourists strolled in the gardens. In the hills behind the town he could see the redbrick arcade of the Aqua Augusta where she ran above the surface. He wondered if the water was flowing yet but he didn’t dare stop to find out. In truth, he didn’t care. What had earlier seemed the most vital matter in the world had dwindled in importance to nothing. What were Exomnius and Corax now but dust? Not even dust; barely even a memory. He wondered what had happened to the other men. But the image he could not rid himself of was Corelia—the way she had swept back her hair as she mounted her horse, and the way she had dwindled into the distance, following the road he had set for her—to the fate that he, and not destiny, had decreed for her.

He passed through Neapolis and out into the open country again, into the immense road tunnel that Agrippa had carved beneath the promontory of Pausilypon—in which the torches of the highway slaves, as Seneca had observed, did not so much pierce the darkness as reveal it—past the immense concrete grain wharves of the Puteoli harbor—another of Agrippa’s projects—past the outskirts of Cumae—where the sibyl was said to hang in her bottle and wish for death—past the vast oyster beds of Lake Avernus, past the great terraced baths of Baiae, past the drunks on the beaches and the souvenir shops with their brightly painted glassware, the children flying kites, the fishermen repairing their flaxen nets on the quaysides, the men playing bones in the shade of the oleanders, past the century of marines in full kit running at double time down to the naval base—past all the teeming life of the Roman superpower, while on the opposite side of the bay Vesuvius emitted a second, rolling boom, turning the fountain of rock from gray to black and pushing it even higher.

Pliny’s greatest concern was that it might all be over before he got there. Every so often he would come waddling out of his library to check on the progress of the column. Each time he was reassured. Indeed, if anything, it seemed to be growing. An accurate estimation of its height was impossible. Posidonius held that mists, winds, and clouds rose no more than five miles above the earth, but most experts—and Pliny, on balance, took the majority view—put the figure at a hundred eleven miles. Whatever the truth, the thing—the column—“the manifestation,” as he had decided to call it—was enormous.

In order to make his observations as accurate as possible he had ordered that his water clock should be carried down to the harbor and set up on the poop deck of the liburnian. While this was being done and the ship made ready he searched his library for references to Vesuvius. He had never before paid much attention to the mountain. It was so huge, so obvious, so inescapablythere, that he had preferred to concentrate on nature’s more esoteric aspects. But the first work he consulted, Strabo’sGeography, brought him up short. “This area appears to have been on fire in the past and to have had craters of flame . . .” Why had he never noticed it? He called in Gaius to take a look.

“You see here? He compares the mountain to Etna. Yet how can that be? Etna has a crater two miles across. I have seen it with my own eyes, glowing across the sea at night. And all those islands that belch flames—Strongyle, ruled by Aeolus, god of wind, Lipari, and Holy Island, where Vulcan is said to live—you can see them all burning. No one has ever reported embers on Vesuvius.”

“He says the craters of flame ‘were subsequently extinguished by a lack of fuel,’ ” his nephew pointed out. “Perhaps that means some fresh source of fuel has now been tapped by the mountain, and has brought it back to life.” Gaius looked up excitedly. “Could that explain the arrival of the sulfur in the water of the aqueduct?”

Pliny regarded him with fresh respect. Yes. The lad was right. That must be it. Sulfur was the universal fuel of all these phenomena—the coil of flame at Comphantium in Bactria, the blazing fish pool on the Babylonian plain, the field of stars near Mount Hesperius in Ethiopia. But the implications of that were awful: Lipari and Holy Island had once burned in midsea for days on end, until a deputation from the senate had sailed out to perform a propitiatory ceremony. A similar explosive fire on the Italian mainland, in the middle of a crowded population, could be a disaster.

He pushed himself to his feet. “I must get down to my ship. Alexion!” He shouted for his slave. “Gaius, why don’t you come with me? Forget your translation.” He held out his hand and smiled. “I release you from your lesson.”

“Do you really, uncle?” Gaius stared across the bay and chewed his lip. Clearly he, too, had realized the potential consequences of a second Etna on the bay. “That’s kind of you, but to be honest I’ve actually reached rather a tricky passage. Of course, if you insist . . .”

Pliny could see he was afraid, and who could blame him? He felt a flutter of apprehension in his own stomach, and he was an old soldier. It crossed his mind to order the boy to come—no Roman should ever succumb to fear: what had happened to the stern values of his youth?—but then he thought of Julia. Was it fair to expose her only son to needless danger? “No, no,” he said, with forced cheerfulness. “I won’t insist. The sea looks rough. It will make you sick. You stay here and look after your mother.” He pinched his nephew’s pimply cheek and ruffled his greasy hair. “You’ll make a good lawyer, Gaius Plinius. Perhaps a great one. I can see you in the senate one day. You’ll be my heir. My books will be yours. The name of Pliny will live through you.” He stopped. It was beginning to sound too much like a valedictory. He said gruffly, “Return to your studies. Tell your mother I’ll be back by nightfall.”

Leaning on the arm of his secretary, and without a backward glance, the admiral shuffled out of his library.

Attilius had ridden past the Piscina Mirabilis, over the causeway into the port, and was beginning his ascent of the steep road to the admiral’s villa when he saw a detachment of marines ahead clearing a path for Pliny’s carriage. He just had time to dismount and step into the street before the procession reached him.

“Admiral!”

Pliny, staring fixedly ahead, turned vaguely in his direction. He saw a figure he did not recognize, covered in dust, his tunic torn, his face, arms, and legs streaked with dried blood. The apparition spoke again. “Admiral! It’s Marcus Attilius!”

“Engineer?” Pliny signaled for the carriage to stop. “What’s happened to you?”

“It’s a catastrophe, admiral. The mountain is exploding—raining rocks.” Attilius licked his cracked lips. “Thousands of people are fleeing east along the coastal road. Oplontis and Pompeii are being buried. I’ve ridden from Herculaneum. I have a message for you”—he searched in his pocket—“from the wife of Pedius Cascus.”

“Rectina?” Pliny took the letter from his hands and broke the seal. He read it twice, his expression clouding, and suddenly he looked ill—ill and overwhelmed. He leaned over the side of the carriage and showed the hasty scrawl to Attilius:

Pliny, my dearest friend, the library is in peril. I am alone. I beg you to come for us by sea—at once—if you still love these old books and your faithful old Rectina.

“This is really true?” he asked. “The Villa Calpurnia is threatened?”

“The entire coast is threatened, admiral.” What was wrong with the old man? Had drink and age entirely dulled his wits? Or did he think it was all just a show—some spectacle in the amphitheater, laid on for his interest? “The danger follows the wind. It swings like a weathervane. Even Misenum might not be safe.”

“Even Misenum might not be safe,” repeated Pliny. “And Rectina is alone.” His eyes were watering. He rolled up the letter and beckoned to his secretary, who had been running with the marines beside the carriage. “Where is Antius?”

“At the quayside, admiral.”

“We need to move quickly. Climb in next to me, Attilius.” He rapped his ring on the side of the carriage. “Forward!” Attilius squeezed in beside him as the carriage lurched down the hill. “Now tell me everything you’ve seen.”

Attilius tried to order his thoughts, but it was hard to speak coherently. Still, he tried to convey the power of what he had witnessed when the roof of the mountain lifted off. And the blasting of the summit, he said, was merely the culmination of a host of other phenomena—the sulfur in the soil, the pools of noxious gas, the earth tremors, the swelling of the land that had severed the matrix of the aqueduct, the disappearance of the local springs. All these things were interconnected.

“And none of us recognized it,” said Pliny, with a shake of his head. “We were as blind as old Pomponianus, who thought it was the work of Jupiter.”

“That’s not quite true, admiral. One man recognized it—a native of the land near Etna: my predecessor, Exomnius.”

“Exomnius?” said Pliny sharply. “Who hid a quarter of a million sesterces at the bottom of his own reservoir?” He noticed the bafflement on the engineer’s face. “It was discovered this morning when the last of the water had drained away. Why? Do you know how he came by it?”

They were entering the docks. Attilius could see a familiar sight—theMinerva lying alongside the quay, her mainmast raised and ready to sail—and he thought how odd it was, the chain of events and circumstances that had brought him to this place at this time. If Exomnius had not been born a Sicilian, he would never have ventured onto Vesuvius and would never have disappeared, Attilius would never have been dispatched from Rome, would never have set foot in Pompeii, would never have known of Corelia or Ampliatus or Corax. For a brief moment, he glimpsed the extraordinary, perfect logic of it all, from poisoned fish to hidden silver, and he tried to think how best he could describe it to the admiral. But he had barely started before Pliny waved him to stop.

“The pettiness and avarice of man!” he said impatiently. “It would make a book in itself. What does any of it matter now? Put it in a report and have it ready on my return. And the aqueduct?”

“Repaired, admiral. Or at any rate she was when I left her this morning.”

“Then you have done good work, engineer. And it will be made known in Rome, I promise you. Now go back to your quarters and rest.”

The wind was flapping the cables against theMinerva’ s mast. Torquatus stood by the aft gangplank talking to the flagship commander, Antius, and a group of seven officers. They came to attention as Pliny’s carriage approached.

“Admiral, with your permission, I would rather sail with you.”

Pliny looked at him in surprise, then grinned and clapped his pudgy hand on Attilius’s knee. “A naturalist! You’re just like me! I knew it the moment I saw you! We shall do great things this day, Marcus Attilius.” He was wheezing out his orders even as his secretary helped him from the carriage. “Torquatus—we sail immediately. The engineer will join us. Antius—sound the general alarm. Have a signal flashed to Rome in my name: ‘Vesuvius exploded just before the seventh hour. The population of the bay is threatened. I am putting the entire fleet to sea to evacuate survivors.’ ”

Antius stared at him. “Theentire fleet, admiral?”

“Everything that floats. What have you got out there?” Pliny peered shortsightedly toward the outer harbor where the warships rode at anchor, rocking in the gathering swell. “TheConcordia. TheLibertas .Justitia . And what’s that one—thePietas ? TheEuropa .” He waved his hand. “All of them. And everything in the inner harbor that isn’t in drydock. Come on, Antius! You were complaining the other night that we had the mightiest fleet in the world but it never saw action. Well, here is action for you.”

“But action requires an enemy, admiral.”

“There’s your enemy.” He pointed to the dark pall spreading in the distance. “A greater enemy than any force Caesar ever faced.”

For a moment Antius did not move and Attilius wondered if he might even be considering disobeying, but then a gleam came into his eyes and he turned to the officers. “You heard your orders. Signal the emperor and sound the general muster. And let it be known that I’ll cut the balls off any captain who isn’t at sea within half an hour.”

It was at the midpoint of the ninth hour, according to the admiral’s water clock, that theMinerva was pushed away from the quayside and slowly began to swivel around to face the open sea. Attilius took up his old position against the rail and nodded to Torquatus. The captain responded with a slight shake of his head, as if to say he thought the venture madness.

“Note the time,” commanded Pliny, and Alexion, squatting beside him, dipped his pen into his ink and scratched down a numeral on a piece of papyrus.

A comfortable chair with armrests and a high back had been set up for the admiral on the small deck and from this elevated position he surveyed the scene as it swung before him. It had been a dream of his over the past two years to command the fleet in battle—to draw this immense sword from its scabbard—even though he knew Vespasian had only appointed him as a peacetime administrator, to keep the blade from rusting. But enough of drills. Now at last he could see what battle stations really looked like: the piercing notes of the trumpets drawing men from every corner of Misenum, the rowboats ferrying the first of the sailors out to the huge triremes and quadriremes, the advance guard already boarding the warships and swarming over the decks, the high masts being raised, the oars readied. Antius had promised him he would have twenty ships operational immediately. That was four thousand men—a legion!

When theMinerva was pointing directly eastward the double bank of oars dipped, the drums began to beat belowdecks, and she was stroked forward. He could hear his personal standard, emblazoned with the imperial eagle, catching the wind from the sternpost behind him. The breeze was on his face. He felt a tightening of anticipation in his stomach. The whole town had turned out to watch. He could see them lining the streets, leaning out of the windows, standing on the flat roofs. A thin cheer carried across the harbor. He searched the hillside for his own villa, saw Gaius and Julia outside the library, and raised his hand. Another cheer greeted the gesture.

“You see the fickleness of the mob?” he called happily to Attilius. “Last night I was spat at in the street. Today I am a hero. All they live for is a show!” He waved again.

“Yes—and see what they do tomorrow,” muttered Torquatus, “if half their men are lost.”

Attilius was taken aback by his anxiety. He said quietly, “You think we are in that much danger?”

“These ships look strong, engineer, but they’re held together by rope. I’ll happily fight against any mortal enemy. But only a fool sails into combat with nature.”

The pilot at the prow shouted a warning and the helmsman, standing behind the admiral, heaved on the steering oar. TheMinerva threaded between the anchored warships, close enough for Attilius to see the faces of the sailors on the decks, and then she swung again, passing along the natural rock wall of the harbor, which seemed to open slowly, like the wheeled door of a great temple. For the first time they had a clear view of what was happening across the bay.

Pliny gripped the arms of his chair, too overcome to speak. But then he remembered his duty to science. “Beyond the promontory of Pausilypon,” he dictated hesitantly, “the whole of Vesuvius and the surrounding coast are masked by a drifting cloud, whitish-gray in color, and streaked with black.” But that was too bland, he thought: he needed to convey some sense of awe. “Thrusting above this, bulging and uncoiling, as if the hot entrails of the earth are being drawn out and dragged toward the heavens, rises the central column of the manifestation.” That was better. “It grows,” he continued, “as if supported by a continual blast. But at its uppermost reaches, the weight of the exuded material becomes too great, and in pressing down spreads sideways. Wouldn’t you agree, engineer?” he called. “It is the weight that is spreading it sideways?”

“The weight, admiral,” Attilius shouted back. “Or the wind.”

“Yes, a good point. Add that to the record, Alexion. The wind appears stronger at the higher altitude, and accordingly topples the manifestation to the southeast.” He gestured to Torquatus. “We should take advantage of this wind, captain! Make full sail!”

“Madness,” said Torquatus to Attilius under his breath. “What sort of commander seeks out a storm?” But he shouted to his officers: “Raise the mainsail!”

The transverse pole that supported the sail was lifted from its resting place in the center of the hull and Attilius had to scramble toward the stern as the sailors on either side seized the cables and began to haul it up the mast. The sail was still furled, and when it reached its position beneath the carchesium—“the drinking cup,” as they called the observation platform—a young lad of no more than ten shinnied up the mast to release it. He scampered along the yardarm, untying the fastenings, and when the last was loosened the heavy linen sail dropped and filled immediately, tautening with the force of the wind. TheMinerva creaked and picked up speed, scudding through the waves, raising curls of white foam on either side of her sharp prow, like a chisel slicing through soft wood.

Pliny felt his spirits fill with the sail. He pointed to the left. “There’s our destination, captain. Herculaneum! Steer straight toward the shore—to the Villa Calpurnia!”

“Yes, admiral! Helmsman—take us east!”

The sail cracked and the ship heeled. A wave of spray drenched Attilius—a glorious sensation. He rubbed the dust from his face and ran his hands through his filthy hair. Belowdecks, the drums had increased to a frantic tempo, and the oars became a blur in the crashing waves and spray. Pliny’s secretary had to lay his arms across his papyri to prevent them blowing away. Attilius looked up at the admiral. Pliny was leaning forward in his chair, his plump cheeks glistening with sea-spray, eyes alight with excitement, grinning wide, all trace of his former exhaustion gone. He was a cavalryman on his horse again, pounding across the German plain, javelin in hand, to wreak havoc on the barbarians.

“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. TheMinerva 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. TheMinerva 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 theMinerva’ 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!”

There was some jeering from the darkness.

“If we return, more like!”

“It was you who got us into the mess!”

“Silence!” yelled Torquatus. “Engineer, will you help me?” He had mounted the short ladder to the trapdoor and was trying to push it open but the weight of the pumice made it hard to lift. Attilius groped his way along the gantry and joined him on the ladder, holding on to it with one hand, heaving with the other at the wooden panel above his head. Together they raised it slowly, releasing a cascade of debris that bounced off their heads and clattered onto the timbers below. “I need twenty men!” ordered Torquatus. “You five banks of oars—follow me.”

Attilius climbed out after him into the whirl of flying pumice. There was a strange, almost brownish light, as in a sandstorm, and as he straightened Torquatus grabbed his arm and pointed. It took Attilius a moment to see what he meant, but then he glimpsed it too—a row of winking yellow lights showing faintly through the murk.Pompeii, he thought—Corelia!

“We’ve drifted beneath the worst of it and come in close to the coast!” shouted the captain. “The gods alone know where! We’ll try to run her aground! Help me at the helm!” He turned and pushed the nearest of the oarsmen back toward the trapdoor. “Get back below and tell the others to row—to row for their lives! The rest of you—hoist the sail!”

He ran along the side of the ship toward the stern and Attilius followed, his head lowered, his feet sinking into the heavy blanket of white pumice that covered the deck like snow. They were so low in the water he felt he could almost have stepped down onto the carpet of rock and walked ashore. He clambered up onto the poop deck and with Torquatus he seized the great oar that steered the liburnian. But even with two men swinging on it, the blade wouldn’t move against the floating mass.

Dimly, he could see the shape of the sail beginning to rise before them. He heard the crack as it started to fill, and at the same time there was a ripple of movement along the banks of oars. The helm shuddered slightly beneath his hands. Torquatus pushed and he heaved, his feet scrabbling for a purchase in the loose stone, and slowly he felt the wooden shaft begin to move. For a while the liburnian seemed to list, motionless, and then a gust of wind propelled them forward. He heard the drum beating again below, the oars settling into a steady rhythm, and from the gloom ahead the shape of the coast began to emerge—a breakwater, a sandy beach, a row of villas with torches lit along the terraces, people moving at the edge of the sea, where waves were pounding the shore, lifting the boats in the shallows and flinging them back on land. Whatever place this was, he realized with disappointment, it was not Pompeii.

Suddenly the rudder jumped and moved so freely he thought it must have snapped and Torquatus swung it hard, aiming them toward the beach. They had broken clear of the clinging pumice and were into the rolling waves, the force of the sea and the wind propelling them directly at the shore. He saw the crowd of people on the beach, all trying to load their possessions into the boats, turn to look at them in astonishment, saw them break and scatter as the liburnian bore down upon them. Torquatus cried out, “Brace yourselves!” and an instant later the hull scraped rock and Attilius went flying down onto the main deck, his landing cushioned by the foot-thick mattress of stone.

He lay there for a moment, winded, his cheek pressed to the warm, dry pumice, as the ship rolled beneath him. He heard the shouts of the sailors coming up from belowdecks, and the splashes as they jumped into the surf. He raised himself and saw the sail being lowered, the anchor flung over the side. Men with ropes were running up the beach, trying to find places to secure the ship. It was twilight—not the twilight thrown out by the eruption, which they seemed to have sailed straight through, but the natural dusk of early evening. The shower of stones was light and intermittent and the noise as they scattered over the deck and plopped into the sea was lost in the boom of the surf and the roar of the wind. Pliny had emerged from the trapdoor and was stepping carefully through the pumice, supported by Alexion—a solid and dignified figure in the midst of the panic all around him. If he felt any fear he did not show it and as Attilius approached he raised his arm almost cheerfully.

“Well, this is a piece of good fortune, engineer. Do you see where we are? I know this place well. This is Stabiae—a most pleasant town in which to spend an evening. Torquatus!” He beckoned to the captain. “I suggest we stay here for the night.”

Torquatus regarded him with incredulity. “We have no choice about it, admiral. No ship can be launched against this wind. The question is: how soon will it carry that wall of rock upon us?”

“Perhaps it won’t,” said Pliny. He gazed across the surf at the lights of the little town, rising into the low hillside. It was separated from the beach by the coastal road that ran all around the bay. The highway was clogged with the same weary traffic of refugees that Attilius had encountered earlier at Herculaneum. On the shore itself, perhaps a hundred people had congregated with their possessions, hoping to escape by sea, but unable to do more than gaze hopelessly at the crashing waves. One fat and elderly man stood apart, surrounded by his household, occasionally throwing up his hands in lamentation, and Attilius felt a stir of recognition. Pliny had noticed him, too. “That’s my friend, Pomponianus. The poor old fool,” he said, sadly. “A nervous fellow at the best of times. He’ll need our comfort. We must wear our bravest faces. Assist me to the shore.”

Attilius jumped down into the sea, followed by Torquatus. The water was up to their waists at one moment, at the next it was swirling around their necks. It was no easy task to take off a man of the admiral’s weight and condition. With Alexion’s help Pliny finally got down onto his backside and shuffled forward and as they took his arms he slipped into the water. They managed to keep his head above the surface, and then, in an impressive show of self-control, he shrugged off their support and waded ashore unaided.

“A stubborn old fool,” said Torquatus, as they watched him march up the beach and embrace Pomponianus. “A magnificent, courageous, stubborn old fool. He’s almost killed us twice and I swear he’ll try again before he’s finished.”

Attilius glanced along the coast toward Vesuvius, but he couldn’t see much in the gathering darkness except for the luminous white lines of the waves running in to batter the coast, and beyond them the inky black of the falling rock. Another line of red lightning split the sky. He said, “How far are we from Pompeii?”

“Three miles,” answered Torquatus. “Perhaps less. It looks like they’re taking the worst of it, poor wretches. This wind—the men had better seek some shelter.”

He began wading toward the shore, leaving Attilius alone.

If Stabiae was three miles downwind of Pompeii, and Vesuvius lay five miles to the other side of the city, then this monstrous cloud must be eight miles long. Eight miles long, and—what?—at least five miles wide, given how far it reached out into the sea. Unless Corelia had fled very early, she would have had no chance of escape.

He stood there for a while, buffeted by the sea, until at length he heard the admiral calling his name. Helplessly he turned and made his way through the restless shallows, up onto the beach to join the rest.

Pomponianus had a villa on the seashore only a short walk along the road, and Pliny was suggesting they should all return to it. Attilius could hear them arguing as he approached. Pomponianus, panicky, was objecting in his high voice that if they left the beach they would lose their chance of a place in a boat. But Pliny waved that away. “No sense in waiting here,” he said. His voice was urgent. “Besides, you can always sail with us, when the wind and sea are more favorable. Come, Livia—take my arm.” And with Pomponianus’s wife on one side and Alexion on the other, and with the household slaves strung out behind them—lugging marble busts, carpets, chests, and candelabra—he led them up onto the road.

He was hurrying as fast as he could, his cheeks puffed out, and Attilius thought,He knows—he knows from his observations what is about to happen. Sure enough they had just reached the gates of the villa when it came on them again like a summer storm—first a few heavy drops, as a warning, and then the air exploded over the myrtle bushes and the cobbled courtyard. Attilius could feel someone’s body pressing into his from behind; he pushed into the man in front and together they tumbled through the door and into the darkened, deserted villa. People were wailing, knocking blindly into the furniture. He heard a woman’s scream and a crash. The disembodied face of a slave appeared, illuminated from below by an oil lamp, and then the face vanished and he heard the familiarwumph as a torch was lit. They huddled in the comfort of the light, masters and slaves alike, as the pumice clattered onto the terra-cotta roof of the villa and smashed into the ornamental gardens outside. Someone went off with the oil lamp to fetch more torches and some candles, and the slaves went on lighting them long after there was sufficient light, as if somehow the brighter the scene, the more safe they would be. The crowded hall soon had an almost festive feel to it, and that was when Pliny, with his arm draped round the quivering shoulders of Pomponianus, declared that he would like to eat.

The admiral had no belief in an afterlife: “Neither body nor mind has any more sensation after death than it had before birth.” Nevertheless, he put on a display of bravery over the next few hours that none who survived the evening would afterward forget. He

had long ago resolved that when death came for him he would endeavor to meet it in the spirit of Marcus Sergius, whom he had crowned in

theNatural History as the most courageous man who had ever lived—wounded twenty-three times in the course of his campaigns, left crippled, twice captured by Hannibal and held in chains every day for twenty months; Sergius had ridden into his final battle with a right hand made of iron, a substitute for the one he had lost. He was not as successful as Scipio or Caesar, but what did that matter? “All other victors truly have conquered men,” Pliny had written, “but Sergius vanquished fortune also.”

“To vanquish fortune”—that was what a man should strive to do. Accordingly, as the slaves prepared his dinner, he told an astonished Pomponianus that he would first like to take a bath and he waddled off, escorted by Alexion, to soak in a cold tub. He removed his filthy clothes and clambered into the clear water, submerging his head completely into a silent world. Surfacing, he announced that he wished to dictate a few more observations—like the engineer, he reckoned the dimensions of the manifestation at roughly eight miles by six—then allowed himself to be patted dry by one of Pomponianus’s body slaves, anointed in saffron oil, and dressed in one of his friend’s clean togas.

Five of them sat down to dinner—Pliny, Pomponianus, Livia, Torquatus, and Attilius. It was not an ideal number from the point of etiquette, and the din of the pumice on the roof made conversation difficult. Still, at least it meant that he had a couch to himself and space to stretch out. The table and the couches had been carried in from the dining room and set up in the sparkling hall. And if the food was not up to much—the fires were out and the best the kitchens could come up with were cold cuts of meat, fowl, and fish—then Pomponianus, at Pliny’s gentle prompting, had made up for it with the wine. He produced a Falernian, two hundred years old, a vintage from the consulship of Lucius Opimius. It was his final jar (“Not much point in hanging onto it now,” he observed gloomily).

The liquid in the candlelight was the color of rough honey, and after it was decanted but before it was mixed with a younger wine—for it was too bitter to be drunk undiluted—Pliny took it from the slave and inhaled it, catching in its musty aroma the whiff of the old republic: of men of the stamp of Cato and Sergius; of a city fighting to become an empire; of the dust of the Campus Martius; of trial by iron and fire.

The admiral did most of the talking and he tried to keep it light, avoiding all mention, for example, of Rectina and the precious library of the Villa Calpurnia, or the fate of the fleet, which he supposed must be broken up by now and scattered all along the coast. (That alone could be enough to force his suicide, he realized: he had put to sea without waiting for imperial authority; Titus might not be forgiving.) Instead he chose to talk about the wine. He knew a lot about wine. Julia called him “a wine bore.” But what did he care? To bore was the privilege of age and rank. If it had not been for wine his heart would have packed it in years ago.

“The records tell us that the summer in the consulship of Opimius was very much like this one. Long hot days filled with endless sunshine—‘ripe,’ as the vintners call it.” He swirled the wine in his glass and sniffed it. “Who knows? Perhaps, two centuries from now, men will be drinking the vintage from this year of ours, and wondering what we were like. Our skill. Our courage.” The thunder of the barrage seemed to be increasing. Somewhere wood splintered. There was a crash of breaking tiles. Pliny looked around the table at his fellow diners—at Pomponianus, who was wincing at the roof and clinging to the hand of his wife; at Livia, who managed to give him a small, tight smile (she always had been twice the man her husband was); at Torquatus, who was frowning at the floor; and finally at the engineer, who had not said a word throughout the meal. He felt warmly toward the aquarius—a man imbued with curiosity, after his own heart, and who had sailed in search of knowledge.

“Let us drink a toast,” he suggested, “to the genius of Roman engineering—to the Aqua Augusta, which gave us warning of what was to happen, if only we had had the wit to heed it!” He raised his glass toward Attilius. “The Aqua Augusta!”

“The Aqua Augusta!”

They drank, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. And it was a good wine, thought the admiral, smacking his lips. A perfect blend of the old and the young. Like himself and the engineer. And if it proved to be his last? Well then: it was an appropriate wine to end on.

When he announced that he was going to bed, he could see that they assumed he must be joking. But no, he assured them, he was serious. He had trained himself to fall asleep at will—even upright, in a saddle, in a freezing German forest. This? This was nothing! “Your arm, engineer, if you will be so kind.” He wished them all good night.

Attilius held a torch aloft in one hand and with the other he supported the admiral. Together they went out into the central courtyard. Pliny had stayed here often over the years. It was a favorite spot of his: the dappled light on the pink stone, the smell of the flowers, the cooing from the dovecote set in the wall above the veranda. But now the garden was in pitch darkness, trembling with the roar of falling stone. Pumice was strewn across the covered walkway and the clouds of dust from the dry and brittle rock set off his wheezing. He stopped outside the door of his usual room and waited for Attilius to clear a space so that he could pull open the door. He wondered what had happened to the birds. Had they flown away just before the manifestation started, thus offering a portent, if an augur had been on hand to divine it? Or were they out there somewhere in the black night, battered and huddled? “Are you frightened, Marcus Attilius?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.” He rested his hand on the engineer’s shoulder as he kicked off his shoes. “Nature is a merciful deity,” he said. “Her anger never lasts forever. The fire dies. The storm blows itself out. The flood recedes. And this will end as well. You’ll see. Get some rest.”

He shuffled into the windowless room, leaving Attilius to close the door behind him.

The engineer stayed where he was, leaning against the wall, watching the rain of pumice. After a while he heard loud snores emanating from the bedroom.Extraordinary, he thought. Either the admiral was pretending to be asleep—which he doubted—or the old man really had nodded off. He glanced at the sky. Presumably Pliny was right, and the “manifestation,” as he still insisted on calling it, would begin to weaken. But that was not happening yet. If anything, the force of the storm was intensifying. He detected a different, harsher sound to the dropping rock, and the ground beneath his feet was trembling, as it had in Pompeii. He ventured out a cautious pace from beneath the canopy, holding his torch toward the ground, and immediately he was struck hard on his arm. He almost dropped the torch. He grabbed a lump of the freshly fallen rock. Pressing himself against the wall he examined it in the light.

It was grayer than the earlier pumice—denser, larger, as if several pieces had been fused together—and it was hitting the ground with greater force. The shower of frothy white rock had been unpleasant and frightening but not especially painful. To be struck by a piece of this would be enough to knock a man unconscious. How long had this been going on?

He carried it into the hall and gave it to Torquatus. “It’s getting worse,” he said. “While we’ve been eating, the stones have been getting heavier.” And then, to Pomponianus, “What sort of roofs do you have here, sir? Flat or pitched?”

“Flat,” said Pomponianus. “They form terraces. You know—for the views across the bay.”

Ah yes,thought Attilius—the famous views.Perhaps if they had spent a little less time gazing out to sea and rather more looking over their shoulders at the mountain behind them, they might have been better prepared. “And how old is the house?”

“It’s been in my family for generations,” said Pomponianus proudly. “Why?”

“It isn’t safe. With that weight of rock falling on it—and on old timber, too—sooner or later the joists will give way. We need to go outside.”

Torquatus hefted the rock in his hand. “Outside? Into this?”

For a moment nobody spoke. Then Pomponianus started to wail that they were finished, that they should have sacrificed to Jupiter as he had suggested right at the beginning, but that nobody ever listened to him.

“Shut up,” said his wife. “We have cushions, don’t we? And pillows and sheets? We can protect ourselves from rocks.”

Torquatus said, “Where’s the admiral?”

“Asleep.”

“He’s resigned himself to death, hasn’t he? All that nonsense about wine! But I’m not ready to die, are you?”

“No.” Attilius was surprised by the firmness of his answer. After Sabina had died, he had gone on numbly, and if he had been told his existence was about to end, he would not have cared much one way or the other. He didn’t feel that way now.

“Then let’s return to the beach.”

Livia was shouting to the slaves to fetch pillows and linen as Attilius hurried back into the courtyard. He could still hear Pliny’s snores. He banged on the door and tried to open it but even in the short time he had been away the path had filled again with debris. He had to kneel to clear it, then dragged open the door and ran in with his torch. He shook the admiral’s fleshy shoulder and the old man groaned and blinked in the light.

“Let me be.”

He tried to roll back on his side. Attilius did not argue with him. He hooked his elbow under Pliny’s armpit and hauled him to his feet. Staggering under the weight, he pushed the protesting admiral toward the door and they were barely across the threshold when he heard one of the ceiling beams crack behind them and part of the roof came crashing to the floor.

They put the pillows on their heads crossways, so that the ends covered their ears, and tied them in place with strips torn from the sheets, knotting them tightly under their chins. Their bulging white heads gave them the look of blind subterranean insects. Then each collected a torch or a lamp and with one hand on the shoulder of the person in front—apart from Torquatus, who took the lead and who was wearing his helmet rather than a pillow—they set off to walk the gauntlet down to the beach.

All around them was a fury of noise—the heaving sea, the blizzard of rock, the boom of roofs giving way. Occasionally Attilius felt the muffled thump of a missile striking his skull and his ears rang as they had not done since he had been beaten by his teachers as a child. It was like being stoned by a mob—as if the deities had voted Vulcan a triumph and this painful procession, stripped of all human dignity, was how he chose to humiliate his captives. They edged forward slowly, sinking up to their knees in the loose pumice, unable to move any faster than the admiral, whose coughing and wheezing seemed to worsen each time he stumbled forward. He was holding on to Alexion and being held on to by Attilius; behind the engineer came Livia and, behind her, Pomponianus, with the slaves forming a line of torches at the back.

The force of the bombardment had cleared the road of refugees but down on the beach there was a light and it was toward this that Torquatus led them. A few of the citizens of Stabiae and some of the men of theMinerva had broken up one of the useless ships and set it on fire. With ropes, the heavy sail from the liburnian, and a dozen oars they had built themselves a large shelter beside the blaze. People who had been fleeing along the coast had come down from the road, begging for protection, and a crowd of several hundred was jostling for cover. They did not want to let the repulsive-looking newcomers share their makeshift tent and there was some jeering and scuffling around the entrance until Torquatus shouted that he had Admiral Pliny with him and would crucify any marine who refused to obey his orders.

Grudgingly, room was made, and Alexion and Attilius lowered Pliny to the sand just inside the entrance. He asked weakly for some water and Alexion took a gourd from a slave and held it to his lips. He swallowed a little, coughed, and lay down on his side. Alexion gently untied the pillow and placed it under his head. He glanced up at Attilius. The engineer shrugged. He did not know what to say. It seemed to him unlikely that the old man could survive much more of this.

He turned away and peered into the interior of the shelter. People were wedged together, barely able to move. The weight of the pumice was causing the roof to dip and from time to time a couple of the sailors cleared it by lifting it with the ends of their oars, tipping the stones away. Children were crying. One boy sobbed for his mother. Otherwise nobody spoke or shouted. Attilius tried to work out what time it was—he assumed it must be the middle of the night, but then again it would be impossible to tell even if it were dawn—and he wondered how long they could endure. Sooner or later, hunger or thirst, or the pressure of the pumice rising on either side of their tent, would force them to abandon the beach. And then what? Slow suffocation by rock? A death more drawn-out and ingenious than anything man had ever devised in the arena? So much for Pliny’s belief that nature was a merciful deity!

He tugged the pillow from his sweating head and it was as his face was uncovered that he heard someone croaking his name. In the crowded near darkness he could not make out who it was at first, and even when the man thrust his way toward him he did not recognize him, since he seemed to be made of stone, his face chalk-white with dust, his hair raised in spikes, like Medusa’s. Only when he spoke his name—“It’s me, Lucius Popidius”—did he realize that it was one of the aediles of Pompeii.

Attilius seized his arm. “Corelia? Is she with you?”

“My mother—she collapsed on the road.” Popidius was weeping. “I couldn’t carry her any longer. I had to leave her.”

Attilius shook him. “Where’s Corelia?”

Popidius’s eyes were blank holes in the mask of his face. He looked like one of the ancestral effigies on the wall of his house. He swallowed hard.

“You coward,” said Attilius.

“I tried to bring her,” whined Popidius. “But that madman had locked her in her room.”

“So you abandoned her?”

“What else could I do? He wanted to imprison us all!” He clutched at Attilius’s tunic. “Take me with you. That’s Pliny over there, isn’t it? You’ve got a ship? For pity’s sake—I can’t go on alone.”

Attilius pushed him away and stumbled toward the entrance of the tent. The bonfire had been crushed to extinction by the rain of rocks and now that it had gone out the darkness on the beach was not even the darkness of night but of a closed room. He strained his eyes toward Pompeii. Who was to say that the whole world wasn’t in the process of being destroyed? That the very force that held the universe together—thelogos, as the philosophers called it—wasn’t disintegrating? He dropped to his knees and dug his hands into the sand and he knew at that moment, even as the grains squeezed through his fingers, that everything would be annihilated—himself, and Pliny, Corelia, the library at Herculaneum, the fleet, the cities around the bay, the aqueduct, Rome, Caesar, everything that had ever lived or ever been built: everything would eventually be reduced to a shoal of rock and an endlessly pounding sea. None of them would leave so much as a footprint behind them; they wouldn’t even leave a memory. He would die here on the beach with the rest and their bones would be crushed to powder.

But the mountain had not done with them yet. He heard a woman scream and raised his eyes. Faint and miraculous, far in the distance and yet growing in intensity, he saw a corona of fire in the sky.

VENUS

25 August

The final day of the eruption

INCLINATIO

[00:12 hours]

There comes a point when so much magma is being erupted so

quickly that the eruption column density becomes too great

for stable convection to persist. When this condition prevails,

column collapse takes place, generating pyroclastic flows and

surges, which are far more lethal than tephra fall.

—VOLCANOES: A PLANETARY PERSPECTIVE

The light traveled slowly downward from right to left. A sickle of luminous cloud—that was how Pliny described it—sweeping down the western slope of Vesuvius, leaving in its wake a patchwork of fires. Some were winking, isolated pinpricks—farmhouses and villas that had been set alight. But elsewhere whole swaths of the forest were blazing. Vivid, leaping sheets of red-and-orange flame tore jagged holes in the darkness. The scythe moved on, implacably, for at least as long as it would have taken to count to a hundred, flared briefly, and vanished.

“The manifestation,” dictated Pliny, “has moved into a different phase.”

To Attilius, there was something indefinably sinister about that silent, moving crest—its mysterious appearance, its enigmatic death. Born in the ruptured summit of the mountain, it must have rolled away to drown itself in the sea. He remembered the fertile vineyards, the heavy clumps of grapes, the manacled slaves. There would be no vintage this year, ripe or otherwise.

“It’s hard to tell from here,” Torquatus said, “but judging by its position, I reckon that cloud of flame may just have passed over Herculaneum.”

“And yet it doesn’t seem to be on fire,” replied Attilius. “That part of the coast looks entirely dark. It’s as if the town has vanished.”

They looked toward the base of the burning mountain, searching for some point of light, but there was nothing.

The effect on the beach at Stabiae was to shift the balance of terror, first one way and then the other. They could soon smell the fires on the wind, a pungent, acrid taste of sulfur and cinders. Someone screamed that they would all be burned alive. People sobbed, none louder than Lucius Popidius, who was calling for his mother, and then someone else—it was one of the sailors who had been prodding the roof with his oar—exclaimed that the heavy linen was no longer sagging. That quieted the panic.

Attilius cautiously stretched out his arm beyond the shelter of the tent, his palm held upward, as if checking for rain. The marine was right. The air was still full of small missiles but the storm was not as violent as before. It was as if the mountain had found a different outlet for its malevolent energy, in the rushing avalanche of fire rather than in the steady bombardment of rock. In that moment he made up his mind. Better to die doing something—better to fall beside the coastal highway and lie in some unmarked grave—than to cower beneath this flimsy shelter, filled with fearful imaginings, a spectator waiting for the end. He reached for his discarded pillow and planted it firmly on his head, then felt around in the sand for the strip of sheet. Torquatus asked him quietly what he was doing.

“Leaving.”

“Leaving?” Pliny, reclining on the sand, his notes spread around him and weighed down with piles of pumice, looked up sharply. “You’ll do no such thing. I absolutely refuse you permission to go.”

“With the greatest respect, admiral, I take my orders from Rome, not from you.” He was surprised some of the slaves had not also made a run for it. Why not? Habit, he supposed. Habit, and the lack of anywhere to run to.

“But I need you here.” There was a wheedling note in Pliny’s hoarse voice. “What if something should happen to me? Someone must make sure my observations are not lost to posterity.”

“There are others who can do that, admiral. I prefer to take my chance on the road.”

“But you’re a student of nature, engineer. I can tell it. That’s why you came. You’re much more valuable to me here. Torquatus—stop him.”

The captain hesitated, then unfastened his chin strap and took off his helmet. “Take this,” he said. “Metal is better protection than feathers.” Attilius started to protest, but Torquatus thrust it into his hands. “Take it—and good luck.”

“Thank you.” Attilius grasped his hand. “May luck go with you, too.”

It fitted him well enough. He had never worn a helmet before. He stood and picked up a torch. He felt like a gladiator about to enter the arena.

“But where will you go?” protested Pliny.

Attilius stepped into the storm. The light stones pinged off the helmet. It was utterly dark apart from the few torches planted into the sand around the perimeter of the shelter and the distant, glowing pyre of Vesuvius.

“Pompeii.”

Torquatus had estimated the distance between Stabiae and Pompeii at three miles—an hour’s walk along a good road on a fine day. But the mountain had changed the laws of time and space and for a long while Attilius seemed to make no progress at all.

He managed to get up off the beach and onto the road without too much difficulty and he was lucky that the view of Vesuvius was uninterrupted because the fires gave him an aiming point. He knew that as long as he walked straight toward them he must come to Pompeii eventually. But he was pushing into the wind, so that even though he kept his head hunched, shrinking his world to his pale legs and the little patch of stone in which he waded, the rain of pumice stung his face and clogged his mouth and nostrils with dust. With each step he sank up to his knees in pumice and the effect was like trying to climb a hill of gravel, or a barn full of grain—an endless, featureless slope that chafed his skin and tore at the muscles at the top of his thighs. Every few hundred paces he swayed to a stop and somehow, holding the torch, he had to drag first one foot and then the other out of the clinging pumice and pick the stones out of his shoes.

The temptation to lie down and rest was overwhelming and yet it had to be resisted, he knew, because sometimes he stumbled into the bodies of those who had given up already. His torch showed soft forms, mere outlines of humanity, with occasionally a protruding foot or a hand clawing at the air. And it was not only people who had died on the road. He blundered into a team of oxen that had become stuck in the drifts and a horse that had collapsed between the shafts of an abandoned wagon, its burden too heavy to pull: a stone horse pulling a stone cart. All these things appeared as brief apparitions in the flickering circle of light he carried. There must have been much more that mercifully he could not see. Sometimes the living as well as the dead emerged fleetingly out of the darkness—a man carrying a cat; a young woman, naked and deranged; another couple carrying a long brass candelabrum slung across their shoulders, the man at the front and the woman at the back. They were heading in the opposite direction from him. From either side came isolated, barely human cries and moans, such as he imagined might be heard on a battlefield after the fighting was done. He did not stop, apart from once, when he heard a child crying out for its parents. He stopped, listening, and stumbled around for a while, trying to find the source of the voice, calling out in response, but the child went quiet, perhaps out of fear at the sound of a stranger, and eventually he gave up the search.

All this lasted for several hours.

At some point the crescent of light appeared again at the summit of Vesuvius, sweeping down, following more or less the same trajectory as before. The glow was brighter and when it reached the shore, or what he guessed was the shore, it did not die at once but rolled on out to sea before tapering away into the darkness. It was followed by the same easing in the fall of rock. But this time on the slopes of the mountain it seemed to extinguish the fires rather than rekindle them. Soon afterward his torch began to stutter. Most of the pitch had burned away. He pushed on with a renewed energy born of fear because he knew that when it died he would be left helpless in the darkness. And when that moment came it was indeed terrible—more horrible than he had feared. His legs had vanished and he could see nothing, not even if he brought his hand right up to his eyes.

The fires on the side of Vesuvius had also dwindled to an occasional tiny fountain of orange sparks. More red lightning gave a pinkish glow to the underside of the black cloud. He was no longer sure in which direction he was facing. He was disembodied, utterly alone, buried almost up to his thighs in stone, the earth whirling and thundering around him. He flung away his extinguished torch and let himself sink forward. He stretched out his hands and lay there, feeling the mantle of pumice slowly accumulating around his shoulders, and it was peculiarly comforting, like being tucked up in bed at night as a child. He laid his cheek to the warm rock and felt himself relax. A great sense of tranquility suffused him. If this was death then it was not too bad: he could accept this—welcome it, even, as one might a well-earned rest at the end of a hard day’s work out on the arcades of the aqueducts.

In his dreams the ground was melting and he was dropping, tumbling, in a cascade of rocks, toward the center of the earth.

He was woken by heat, and by the smell of burning.

He didn’t know how long he had slept. Long enough to be almost entirely buried. He was in his grave. Panicking, he pushed with his forearms and slowly he felt the weight on his shoulders yield and split, heard the rustle of stones as they tumbled off him. He raised himself and shook his head, spitting the dust from his mouth, blinking his eyes, still buried below the waist.

The rain of pumice had mostly stopped—the familiar warning sign—and in the distance, immediately before him, low in the sky, he saw again the familiar scythe of glowing cloud. Except that this time, instead of moving like a comet from right to left, it was descending fast and spreading laterally, coming his way. Immediately behind it was an interval of darkness that sprang into fire a few moments later as the heat found fresh fuel on the southern flank of the mountain; before it, carried on the furnace wind, came a rolling boom of noise, such that if he had been Pliny he would have varied his metaphor and described it not as a cloud but as a wave—a boiling wave of red-hot vapor that scorched his cheeks and watered his eyes. He could smell his hair singeing.

He writhed to free himself from the grip of the pumice as the sulfurous dawn raced across the sky toward him. Something dark was growing in the center of it, rising out of the ground, and he realized that the crimson light was silhouetting a town less than half a mile away. The vision brightened. He picked out city walls and watchtowers, the pillars of a roofless temple, a row of blasted, sightless windows—andpeople, the shadows ofpeople, running in panic along the lines of the ramparts. The spectacle was sharp for only a little while, just long enough for him to recognize it as Pompeii, and then the glow behind it slowly faded, taking the city with it, back into the darkness.

DILUCULUM

[06:00 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 temple of Venus. A fire started. It became harder to make progress. He sensed that he was wading up a slope and he tried to visualize how the port had looked, the ramped roads leading up from the wharves and quaysides to the city gates. Torches loomed out of the smoky air and passed him. He had expected to encounter crowds of survivors seizing the opportunity to escape from the town, but the traffic was all the other way. People were going back into 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.

At the corner of the fourth block he found the row of shops, three-quarters buried, and scrambled up the slope of pumice onto the low roof. He crouched just behind the ridge. Its outline was sharp. There must be fires beyond it. Slowly he raised his head. Across the flat surface of the buried builders’ yard were the nine high windows of Ampliatus’s baths, each one brilliantly—defiantly—lit by torches and by scores of oil lamps. He could see some of the painted gods on the far walls and the figures of men moving in front of them. All that was lacking was music: then it would have looked as though a party were in progress.

Attilius slithered down into the enclosed space and set off across it. Such was the intensity of the illumination that he cast a shadow. As he came closer he saw that the figures were slaves and that they were clearing the drifts of pumice where they had been blown into the three big chambers—the changing room, the tepidarium, and the caldarium—digging it out like snow with wooden shovels where it was deepest, or elsewhere merely sweeping it away with brooms. Patrolling behind them was Ampliatus, shouting that they should work harder, occasionally grabbing a shovel or a brush himself and showing how it should be done, before resuming his obsessive pacing. Attilius stood watching for a few moments, hidden in the darkness, and then cautiously began to climb toward the middle room—the tepidarium—at the back of which he could see the entrance to the domed sweating chamber.

There was no chance he could enter without being seen, so in the end he simply walked in—waded across the surface of the pumice, straight through the open window, his feet crunching on the tiled floor, the slaves staring at him in amazement. He was halfway to the sweating room when Ampliatus saw him—“Aquarius!”—and hurried to intercept him. He was smiling, his palms spread wide. “Aquarius! I’ve been expecting you!”

He had a cut in his temple and the hair on the left side of his scalp was stiff with blood. His cheeks were scratched and more blood had seeped through the coating of dust, carving red furrows in the white. The mouth was turned up at the corners: a mask of comedy. The dazzling light was reflected in his eyes, which were open very wide. Before Attilius could say anything he started talking again. “We must get the aqueduct running immediately. Everything is ready, you see. Nothing is damaged. We could open for business tomorrow, if only we could connect the water.” He was talking very quickly, the words tumbling out of him, barely finishing one sentence before he went on to the next. So much in his head to express! He could see it all! “People will need one place in the town that works. They’ll need to bathe—it’ll be dirty work, getting everything back in order. But it’s not just that. It’ll be a symbol to gather around. If they see the baths are working, it will give them confidence. Confidence is the key to everything. The key to confidence is water. Water is everything, d’you see? I need you, aquarius. Fifty-fifty. What do you say?”

“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 laconicum. Seated on the stone benches around this 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 word to Corelia. She seemed paralyzed 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 toward Massavo. They were under guard, Attilius realized: the laconicum was their prison cell.

“Nobody is leaving,” repeated Ampliatus. “Massavo!”

Attilius seized Corelia’s wrist and tried to drag her toward 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 onto 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 farther 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 toward 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 toward the north? Perhaps it had been waiting for him from the start: his destiny.

He peered toward 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 toward the Stabian Gate. He heard Ampliatus issuing more orders—“You two take the side street, 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 toward it. Even Massavo wouldn’t 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, toward 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 toward 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 each other in the water. And then there was only scalding heat and the stench of sulfur 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.

—ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VOLCANOES

An incandescent sandstorm raced down the hill toward 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 eardrums, 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 gatekeeper, Massavo, who were running down the street toward 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 harbor 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, traveling in the wake of the surge, flowed over the city, shrouding the landscape and molding 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 favorite possessions or clutching nothing—vacuums suspended in midair at the level of their roofs.

At Stabiae, the wind from the surge caught the makeshift shelter of theMinerva’ s sail and lifted it clear of the beach. The people, exposed, could see the glowing cloud rolling over Pompeii and heading straight toward 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 center 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 behavior, 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. Toward 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 gray 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 toward 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 rumors 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 that 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 tunneled 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.