THE ERUPTION.
The Deluge of Ashes.—The Deluge of Fire.—The Flight of the Pompeians.—The Preoccupations of the Pompeian Women.—The Victims: the Family of Diomed; the Sentinel; the Woman Walled up in a Tomb; the Priest of Isis; the Lovers clinging together, etc.—The Skeletons.—The Dead Bodies moulded by Vesuvius.
It was during one of these festivals, on the 23d of November, 79, that the terrible eruption which overwhelmed the city burst forth. The testimony of the ancients, the ruins of Pompeii, the layers upon layers of ashes and scoriæ that covered it, the skeletons surprised in attitudes of agony or death, all concur to tell us of the catastrophe. The imagination can add nothing to it: the picture is there before our eyes; we are present at the scene; we behold it. Seated in the amphitheatre, we take to flight at the first convulsions, at the first lurid flashes which announce the conflagration and the crumbling of the mountain. The ground is shaken repeatedly; and something like a whirlwind of dust, that grows thicker and thicker, has gone rushing and spinning across the heavens. For some days past there has been talk of gigantic forms, which, sometimes on the mountain and sometimes in the plain, swept through the air; they are up again now, and rear themselves to their whole height in the eddies of smoke, from amid which is heard a strange sound, a fearful moaning followed by claps of thunder that crash down, peal on peal. Night, too, has come on—a night of horror; enormous flames kindle the darkness like the blaze of a furnace. People scream, out in the streets, "Vesuvius is on fire!"
On the instant, the Pompeians, terrified, bewildered, rush from the amphitheatre, happy in finding so many places of exit through which they can pour forth without crushing each other, and the open gates of the city only a short distance beyond. However, after the first explosion, after the deluge of ashes, comes the deluge of fire, or light stones, all ablaze, driven by the wind—one might call it a burning snow—descending slowly, inexorably, fatally, without cessation or intermission, with pitiless persistence. This solid flame blocks up the streets, piles itself in heaps on the roofs and breaks through into the houses with the crashing tiles and the blazing rafters. The fire thus tumbles in from story to story, upon the pavement of the courts, where, accumulating like earth thrown in to fill a trench, it receives fresh fuel from the red and fiery flakes that slowly, fatally, keep showering down, falling, falling, without respite.
The inhabitants flee in every direction; the strong, the youthful, those who care only for their lives, escape. The amphitheatre is emptied in the twinkling of an eye and none remain in it but the dead gladiators. But woe to those who have sought shelter in the shops, under the arcades of the theatre, or in underground retreats. The ashes surround and stifle them! Woe, above all, to those whom avarice or cupidity hold back; to the wife of Proculus, to the favorite of Sallust, to the daughters of the house of the Poet who have tarried to gather up their jewels! They will fall suffocated among these trinkets, which, scattered around them, will reveal their vanity and the last trivial cares that then beset them, to after ages. A woman in the atrium attached to the house of the Faun ran wildly as chance directed, laden with jewelry; unable any longer to get breath, she had sought refuge in the tablinum, and there strove in vain to hold up, with her outstretched arms, the ceiling crumbling in upon her. She was crushed to death, and her head was missing when they found her.
In the Street of the Tombs, a dense crowd must have jostled each other, some rushing in from, the country to seek safety in the city, and others flying from the burning houses in quest of deliverance under the open sky. One of them fell forward with his feet turned toward the Herculaneum gate; another on his back, with his arms uplifted. He bore in his hands one hundred and twenty-seven silver coins and sixty-nine pieces of gold. A third victim was also on his back; and, singular fact, they all died looking toward Vesuvius!
A female holding a child in her arms had taken shelter in a tomb which the volcano shut tight upon her; a soldier, faithful to duty, had remained erect at his post before the Herculaneum gate, one hand upon his mouth and the other on his spear. In this brave attitude he perished. The family of Diomed had assembled in his cellar, where seventeen victims, women, children, and the young girl whose throat was found moulded in the ashes, were buried alive, clinging closely to each other, destroyed there by suffocation, or, perhaps, by hunger. Arrius Diomed had tried to escape alone, abandoning his house and taking with him only one slave, who carried his money-wallet. He fell, struck down by the stifling gases, in front of his own garden. How many other poor wretches there were whose last agonies have been disclosed to us!—the priest of Isis, who, enveloped in flames and unable to escape into the blazing street, cut through two walls with his axe and yielded his last breath at the foot of the third, where he had fallen with fatigue or struck down by the deluge of ashes, but still clutching his weapon. And the poor dumb brutes, tied so that they could not break away,—the mule in the bakery, the horses in the tavern of Albinus, the goat of Siricus, which had crouched into the kitchen oven, where it was recently found, with its bell still attached to its neck! And the prisoners in the blackhole of the gladiators' barracks, riveted to an iron rack that jammed their legs! And the two lovers surprised in a shop near the Thermæ; both were young, and they were tightly clasped in each other's arms.... How awful a night and how fearful a morrow! Day has come, but the darkness remains; not that of a moonless night, but that of a closed room without lamp or candle. At Misenum, where Pliny the younger, who has described the catastrophe, was stationed, nothing was heard but the voices of children, of men, and of women, calling to each other, seeking each other, recognizing each other by their cries alone, invoking death, bursting out in wails and screams of anguish, and believing that it was the eternal night in which gods and men alike were rushing headlong to annihilation. Then there fell a shower of ashes so dense that, at the distance of seven leagues from the volcano, one had to shake one's clothing continually, so as not to be suffocated. These ashes went, it is said, as far as Africa, or, at all events, to Rome, where they filled the atmosphere and hid the light of day, so that even the Romans said: "The world is overturned; the sun is falling on the earth to bury itself in night, or the earth is rushing up to the sun to be consumed in his eternal fires." "At length," writes Pliny, "the light returned gradually, and the star that sheds it reappeared, but pallid as in an eclipse. The whole scene around us was transformed; the ashes, like a heavy snow, covered everything."
This vast shroud was not lifted until in the last century, and the excavations have narrated the catastrophe with an eloquence which even Pliny himself, notwithstanding the resources of his style and the authority of his testimony, could not attain. The terrible exterminator was caught, as it were, in the very act, amid the ruins he had made. These roofless houses, with the height of one story only remaining and leaving their walls open to the sun; these colonnades that no longer supported anything; these temples yawning wide on all sides, without pediment or portico; this silent loneliness; this look of desolation, distress, and nakedness, which looked like ruins on the morrow of some great fire,—all were enough to wring one's heart. But there was still more: there were the skeletons found at every step in this voyage of discovery in the midst of the dead, betraying the anguish and the terror of that last dreadful hour. Six hundred,—perhaps more,—have already been found, each one illustrating some poignant episode of the immense catastrophe in which they were smitten down!
Recently, in a small street, under heaps of rubbish, the men working on the excavations perceived an empty space, at the bottom of which were some bones. They at once called Signor Fiorelli, who had a bright idea. He caused some plaster to be mixed, and poured it immediately into the hollow, and the same operation was renewed at other points where he thought he saw other similar bones. Afterward, the crust of pumice-stone and hardened ashes which had enveloped, as it were, in a scabbard, this something that they were trying to discover, was carefully lifted off. When these materials had been removed, there appeared four dead bodies.
Any one can see them now, in the museum at Naples; nothing could be more striking than the spectacle. They are not statues, but corpses, moulded by Vesuvius; the skeletons are still there, in those casings of plaster which reproduce what time would have destroyed, and what the damp ashes have preserved,—the clothing and the flesh, I might almost say the life. The bones peep through here and there, in certain places which the plaster did not reach. Nowhere else is there anything like this to be seen. The Egyptian mummies are naked, blackened, hideous; they no longer have anything in common with us; they are laid out for their eternal sleep in the consecrated attitude. But the exhumed Pompeians are human beings whom one sees in the agonies of death.
One of these bodies is that of a woman near whom were picked up ninety-one pieces of coin, two silver urns, and some keys and jewels. She was endeavoring to escape, taking with her these precious articles, when she fell down in the narrow street. You still see her lying on her left side; her head-dress can very readily be made out, as also can the texture of her clothing and two silver rings which she still has on her finger; one of her hands is broken, and you see the cellular structure of the bone; her left arm is lifted and distorted; her delicate hand is so tightly clenched that you would say the nails penetrate the flesh; her whole body appears swollen and contracted; the legs only, which are very slender, remain extended. One feels that she struggled a long time in horrible agony; her whole attitude is that of anguish, not of death.
Behind her had fallen a woman and a young girl; the elder of the two, the mother, perhaps, was of humble birth, to judge by the size of her ears; on her finger she had only an iron ring; her left leg lifted and contorted, shows that she, too, suffered; not so much, however, as the noble lady: the poor have less to lose in dying. Near her, as though upon the same bed, lies the young girl; one at the head, and the other at the foot, and their legs are crossed. This young girl, almost a child, produces a strange impression; one sees exactly the tissue, the stitches of her clothing, the sleeves that covered her arms almost to the wrists, some rents here and there that show the naked flesh, and the embroidery of the little shoes in which she walked; but above all, you witness her last hour, as though you had been there, beneath the wrath of Vesuvius; she had thrown her dress over her head, like the daughter of Diomed, because she was afraid; she had fallen in running, with her face to the ground, and not being able to rise again, had rested her young, frail head upon one of her arms. One of her hands was half open, as though she had been holding something, the veil, perhaps, that covered her. You see the bones of her fingers penetrating the plaster. Her cranium is shining and smooth, her legs are raised backward and placed one upon the other; she did not suffer very long, poor child! but it is her corpse that causes one the sorest pang to see, for she was not more than fifteen years of age.
The fourth body is that of a man, a sort of colossus. He lay upon his back so as to die bravely; his arms and his limbs are straight and rigid. His clothing is very clearly defined, the greaves visible and fitting closely; his sandals laced at the feet, and one of them pierced by the toe, the nails in the soles distinct; the stomach naked and swollen like those of the other bodies, perhaps by the effect of the water, which has kneaded the ashes. He wears an iron ring on the bone of one finger; his mouth is open, and some of his teeth are missing; his nose and his cheeks stand out promimently; his eyes and his hair have disappeared, but the moustache still clings. There is something martial and resolute about this fine corpse. After the women who did not want to die, we see this man, fearless in the midst of the ruins that are crushing him—impavidum ferient ruinæ.
I stop here, for Pompeii itself can offer nothing that approaches this palpitating drama. It is violent death, with all its supreme tortures,—death that suffers and struggles,—taken in the very act, after the lapse of eighteen centuries.