5. pompeii

This morning I looked to the bookshelf and my eyes caught the title, Pompeii. My first thought was, that’ll be the next book I read. I’d recently had visions of volcanoes erupting. Plus, it reminded me of one of my old bosses kid’s song called Pompeii which I think is really good. Give it a listen. My second thought went to the piece of paper marking the book. So I took the book out and opened to the page. This is what it said - 

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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 how 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 terrible brilliance. He was choking, the pain across his chest was an iron band. He staggered backward. 

   Face it, don’t give in.

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   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.”

   Then 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 of stone, 

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