For although their hair and clothes burned briefly, these fires were quickly snuffed out by the lack of oxygen, and instead a muffling, six-foot tide of fine ash, traveling in the wake of the surge, flowed over the city, shrouding the landscape and molding every detail of its fallen victims. This ash hardened. More pumice fell. In their snug cavities the bodies rotted, and with them, as the centuries passed, the memory that there had even been a city on this spot. Pompeii became a town of perfectly shaped hollow citizens—huddled together or lonely, their clothes blown off or lifted over their heads, grasping hopelessly for their favorite possessions or clutching nothing—vacuums suspended in midair at the level of their roofs.
At Stabiae, the wind from the surge caught the makeshift shelter of the
Minerva’
s sail and lifted it clear of the beach. The people, exposed, could see the glowing cloud rolling over
Pompeii
and heading straight toward them.
Everyone ran, Pomponianus and Popidius in the lead.
They would have taken Pliny with them. Torquatus and Alexion had him by the arms and had raised him to his feet. But the admiral was finished with moving and 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 now 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 a terrible brilliance. He was choking, the pain across his chest was an iron band. He staggered backward.
Face it, don’t give in.
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.”
The 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 entirely of stone, and it was also observed that rocks had come to life and assumed human form. A plantation of trees that had been on one side of the road to Nola crossed to the other and bore a crop of mysterious green fruit that was said to cure every affliction, from worms to baldness.
Miraculous, too, were the tales of survival. A blind slave was said to have found his way out of
Pompeii
and to have buried himself inside the belly of a dead horse on the highway to Stabiae, in that way escaping the heat and the rocks. Two beautiful blond children—twins—were found wandering, unharmed, in robes of gold, without a graze on their bodies, and yet unable to speak: they were sent to Rome and taken into the household of the emperor.
Most persistent of all was the legend of a man and a woman who had emerged out of the earth itself at dusk on the day the eruption ended. They had tunneled underground like moles, it was said, for several miles, all the way from
Pompeii
, and had come up where the ground was clear, drenched in the life-giving waters of a subterranean river, which had given them its sacred protection. They were reported to have been seen walking together in the direction of the coast, even as the sun fell over the shattered outline of Vesuvius and the familiar evening breeze from
Capri
stirred the rolling dunes of ash.
But this particular story was generally considered far-fetched and was dismissed as a superstition by all sensible people.