Vesuvius by Night

Chapter 13

For others it had been different.

The peril that not even Nonius could have survived occurred close to midnight. That was when the vast cloud’s weight collapsed back into the volcano’s chamber. Super-heated material then churned with new energy into a different reaction. Mud and steam, heated to a primeval temperature, were sent rolling out of Vesuvius at ground level. The first surge headed straight for Herculaneum.

This was not a slow creep of lava, like those in other eruptions from milder mountains, that local people come to view as it gloops like red-hot porridge over slopes and fields. This was a devastating torrent that rushed at incredible speed, white-hot, yet not even a fireball for it contained too many compressed solids. The avalanche crashed into buildings, either smashing them apart or pouring through windows and doors to fix them in an eternal mould. It covered two miles from peak to coast in moments, destroying all. Battered and splintered material was caught up and carried. Where buildings spontaneously burst into flames, those flames were immediately smothered by rock, mud and detritus.

With the surge came heat. This heat was four times greater than that of boiling water. As it punched across the countryside it carbonised wood, cooked fat, evaporated moisture, desiccated bone. No living thing survived. Uprooted trees were swept away. Any cattle that had escaped previously were lost now. All the birdlife that Larius and other painters loved to portray perished, along with fish and shell-fish, snails, insects, worms, mice. The few people in their homes, the many collected on the beach all died there, and they died at once.

Out of doors, the soldier may have glimpsed the surge’s approach. He may have heard its roar approaching. Before he even gasped, that heat killed him. His corpse pitched forwards, face down, fracturing bones, while his skull split open as his brain boiled. Further along, Erodion’s wife Salvia fell dead on the beach too. Inside the boatsheds, the heat took everyone. Ollia, the watchful mother, opened her eyes instinctively as the noise exploded, yet she and her children took no last breath but were lost, while the sleeping still slept.

This death is terrible to us now. Then and there, nobody realised. No one felt terror or had time to panic. There were no cries. It came too fast for pain or understanding. They were gone. All gone.

So much physical rubble pushed across Herculaneum that the coastline permanently moved out more than a thousand yards. Meanwhile in the normally tideless bay, the sea behaved differently. Shocks deep under the ocean floor caused a great movement. Salt water was suddenly sucked out for a long distance, exposing the seabed, stranding marine life, revealing long-lost wrecks – and creating new ones. Silently, the same sea then gathered into a tall, swelling wave that moved at awesome speed as it returned again, thundered inland, then retreated to its natural place.

Captured in this was Vitalis. His labouring boat was tossed end to end, and everyone thrown out. Drowning is said to be an easy death. For those who have to endure it, it cannot be easy enough.

No one would know how many were lost in that most beautiful of bays. No one could count the people who drowned helplessly out there in the terrifying dark.

Larius would never learn that his decision to keep Marciana with him was as good as any he could have made. Oplontis was buried deep by that first pyroclastic flow, along with Herculaneum. The same unstoppable avalanche of molten mud and rock spread out over the near coast, with its immediate intolerable heat. Larius Lollius died with his eldest daughter almost at the same instant as his wife and other children. Like them, he never knew what happened.

A consequence of such intense heat, well known to firefighters, is that human tendons suddenly contract. In death by thermal heat, an involuntary spasm causes corpses to clench their fists and bring them up defensively. This might have pleased Larius. In his wry way, he would appreciate that when he was taken, he looked like somebody defying fate.