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 this
was
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 the
Natural 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 is
mine.
”
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
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
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.