Pompeii had been shattered by an earthquake sixteen years before the final catastrophe, but the warning had been disregarded. The place was rebuilt with lavish outlay, and embellished with all the resources of contemporary art, so that it was a new and splendid city which was buried by the eruption of 79 A. D. On the 23rd of August in that year, about two o'clock in the afternoon, terrible detonations were heard in the mountain, and shortly afterwards an enormous column of watery vapor issued from the top of it, remained suspended for a time in the air, then condensed and fell in boiling rain on the mountain sides, creating an irresistible torrent of mud, which quickly engulfed the city of Herculaneum. Following this, later in the evening, apparently about dark, came a roaring eruption of red hot pumice stones and volcanic dust, succeeded quickly by other showers of the same material, which covered Pompeii to the depth of fifteen or twenty feet. Thus was the brilliant city, in all the exuberance of its gay life, plunged into death in a single night. And all the inhabitants of that part of Italy believed that they were about to share the same dreadful fate. The air was so thick that for many miles from the volcano it was almost stifling. It is said to have extended as far as Africa. It certainly reached as far as Rome, and covered that city with a pall of darkness so deep that the people took it for a sign of impending doom. They said to each other, "The end of the world is come! the sun is going to fall to the earth, or the earth mount up and be set on fire by the heavens."
The most graphic account of the horrors of that awful night at Pompeii is to be found in the two letters of the younger Pliny to Tacitus. Speaking of his efforts to remove his mother out of reach of harm, while she was begging him to leave her to perish and save himself, he says: "By this time the murky darkness had so increased that one might have believed himself abroad in a black and moonless night, or in a chamber where all the lights had been extinguished. On every hand were heard the complaints of women, the wailing of children, and the cries of men. One called his father, another his son, another his wife, and only by their voices could they know each other. Many in their despair begged that death would come and end their distress. Some implored the gods to succor them, and some believed that this night was the last, the eternal night which should engulf the universe! Even so it seemed to me—and I consoled myself for the coming death with the reflection, Behold the world is passing away!"
No one saw the sun rise on the morrow. The clouds of volcanic matter, still pouring their pitiless rain upon the ruins, so darkened the sky that people could not tell when the day came.
And there, under the superincumbent mass of stones and dust, the city slept undisturbed till a few years ago, with everything as it was in the days of Titus. "It was like a clock that stopped when the householder died. Meats were on the table and bread was in the oven; sentries were in their boxes and dogs on guard at house doors." Most of the inhabitants escaped, but it is estimated, from the skeletons found in the ruins, that not less than two thousand lost their lives. In the museum by the entrance at the Marine Gate we are shown the blackened loaves of bread, recovered from the bakeries, the beans and eggs, the chickens and dogs, or their shapes from the moulds they left—and, most distressing of all, human figures. "Plaster of Paris had been poured into the hollows where bones were found, and in all the contortion of suffocation or convulsion appeared the forms of men and women. How little the ones whose brawny or whose delicate outlines we gazed upon dreamt that they would be their own monuments to-day, and be seen by the eyes of other races and ages, eyes curious, but not unsympathetic! It was good to be in the warm sunshine again. A cloud of smoke floated like a gray scarf—how gracefully and innocently!—from Vesuvius."
POMPEII.
We walked up the narrow streets, paved with blocks of hard lava, deeply rutted by chariot wheels, passing the Basilica, the Forum, the Triumphal Arch, the temples, the theatres, the baths, the bakeries, and the houses of Pansa, Diomedes, and the Tragic Poet—all laid bare and clean to the view. We had the good fortune to see the process of excavation itself—for while most of the city has been disentombed, some of it still remains under the layers of small grayish white pumice stones and brown dust. Three or four men were shovelling these away as we passed. From most of the houses the furniture and wall paintings have been taken away to the museums. But in the last large residence exhumed, one which has only recently been brought to light, nearly everything has been left as it was, except for a new roof of mica or some such substance, which has been built over it for its protection. Nearly all the frescoes are as fresh as on the day when they were painted, and the fountain in the peristyle and its connecting pipes are so perfectly preserved that, when the water was turned into them by the excavators, the fountains began to play as they did on that fateful day eighteen hundred years ago. "For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away," so it was with the careless dwellers in this opulent city—and so it is with the careless dwellers in many an opulent city to-day.
From Naples we turned our faces homeward, taking passage on the König Albert, and coming by way of Gibraltar and the Azores. We had a delightful ship's company, including Dr. Andrew D. White, the accomplished ex-president of Cornell University and our late Ambassador to Berlin, whom we found full of illuminating talk about Fra Paolo Sarpi and other great men and great subjects. After a quiet and restful voyage, affording a pleasant contrast with our experience of the preceding summer when outward bound, we arrived at New York on the 10th of June, 1903, deeply thankful for all the pleasure and benefit the year had brought us, and fully convinced that, after all, ours is the best country in the world.