by Bill Schutt
The Roman stood on the beach in front of the marina, glancing out across the bay. His flag signals requesting more ships to aid in the evacuation had been answered almost immediately—the first from his old friend Pliny. But that had been more than thirteen hours ago and as of yet the architect had spotted no sails—at least none headed in this direction, he thought.
What Proculus would never know was that the admiral had set out with a small fleet many hours earlier. To their horror, the sailors found their way blocked by a massive island of floating pumice. But while others turned back or took off in new directions, Pliny continued to steer east, trying to find some way to reach his friend and evacuate anyone with him who needed rescuing. Finally, after a dense rain of walnut-sized rocks began to pelt his vessel, the heartbroken Pliny was forced to turn his ship toward the Isle of Capri.
Proculus now had one eye on the horizon and the other on two carpenters who were attempting to patch the bottom of an old wreck they’d dragged out in desperation.
He tried to stay cheerful, attempting to joke with the children of parents whose only concern seemed to be whether there would be a place for them on the small craft—if it were ever made seaworthy. Rendering everyone’s task more difficult was the near-constant shifting of the ground beneath their feet.
Remarkably, those who had settled in under the stone arches, filled only hours earlier by boats, were calm now. Parents were sitting in a circle, with their children sleeping in the middle. Some of them Proculus knew; others were refugees from the direction of Pompeii, stopping here because they were exhausted, or being slowed in their progress by small children. Several women were obviously pregnant and had taken shelter here when they could walk no farther. Their footprints would still be present in the sand two thousand years later.
On the beach, a Roman soldier joined the crowd on horseback. Proculus threw the man a salute and beckoned him to come nearer. He would be a useful pair of hands for either the boat repair efforts or perhaps crowd control, once the last boat was ready to be launched.
“Give us a hand, soldier!” Proculus called to the man. “There’s water for your horse and I could certainly use your assistance.”
The soldier, though, did not respond. Instead he turned to look toward the volcano, then spurred his horse onward, moving with the flow of refugees.
“Cowardly dog!” Proculus yelled, and thought about running after the man.
But now a new sound reached him, like the crash of one mountain upon another—loud enough to hurt his ears despite being muffled and distorted by the dust cloud. Turning in the direction of the commotion, Proculus beheld a fiery red sun—wider than Vesuvio itself, shining out through the columns of black dust and falling to earth at incomparable speed.
The sight of it was absolutely horrifying, making his next thought as perplexing as it was incongruous—given the realization that whole towns beneath the new sun were dying. Jove, forgive me. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
The mixture of gas and lava mist burned hotter than iron emerging white from a furnace. From the moment it crashed down upon the volcano’s sides, it flowed like liquid down the mountain’s southern flanks and over the contours of the land—taller than any tidal wave ever recorded by history, and five times as fast. It brightened as it approached, blazing like uncountable millions of stars coming to life, and Proculus could feel their collective radiance against his face.
The disobedient soldier clearly felt it, too, and reining his horse into a tight turn he ran it at full gallop toward one of the arched shelters, giving apparently no thought at all to the people he was about to trample inside.
“Stop, coward! Stop!” Proculus yelled.
His command counted for nothing.
The cedar forest north of Herculaneum was being plowed up by a mighty precursor wave of compressed air, clearing a path for the fiery tidal wave. The tallest trees in the empire were snapped above the roots and flung many times their height. They turned slowly and gracefully, end over end as they flew toward the city. The radiance from the wave was so great that each cartwheeling tree was bursting into flames before it.
Proculus would never know that when death came, its touch would last no more than one two-hundredth of a second. Nor would he have cared. During the last moments of his life, he turned once more to face the sea—now illuminated out to the horizon and growing brighter.
With every instant that remained, he searched the great bay—praying not to see the sails of Pliny’s boats approaching. His prayer answered, Proculus felt relief.
Then he disappeared into history.
Fin
Author’s Note
Reality Check
Although the time frames in our novel shift between 1946 and the first century a.d., the tale serves as a fable for tomorrow—in particular, the danger of racially tagged biological weapons. Since 1945, the question has been whether our electronic civilization will survive its nuclear adolescence. As we learn how to read and edit the code of life itself, the genetic frontier looms ahead as another yin and yang, with great promise and great peril. As we write, curing cancer (the Black Plague of the past century) is almost within reach. Racial tagging (and even a person-specific weapon) also represents a looming reality.
What else in this tale is real, or blurs the lines between reality and fable?
To begin, some of the people:
Charles R. Knight (1874–1953) appears throughout as himself. He was arguably the greatest artist of prehistoric life who ever lived. Long before special effects mavens Willis O’Brian (King Kong, Mighty Joe Young) and Ray Harryhausen (Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Mysterious Island, and so on), put flesh on an array of creatures no human had ever seen, Knight was already bringing multiple lost worlds alive through his paintings. No one was more influential in stimulating the public’s still-growing fascination with dinosaurs than Knight, who (as depicted in our novel) was born in Brooklyn and whose paintings and murals hang prominently in natural history museums across the country. For an amazing look at Knight’s life and art, readers should turn to The Artist Who Saw Through Time, by Richard Milner.
Knight’s granddaughter, Rhoda Knight Kalt, who makes a brief appearance while Wynters and Nesbitt are discussing guinea worms, is a real person. As a child, Rhoda frequently toured the American Museum of Natural History with her beloved grandfather, whom she called “Toppy.” As an adult, no one has done more than Rhoda to perpetuate the legacy of Charles R. Knight.
Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975) was one of history’s great composers. Born Max Herman in New York City, he wrote the musical scores for some of the classic films of the twentieth century, directed by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Orson Wells, Robert Wise, and Fred Zinnemann. Herrmann, who studied at the Juilliard School of Music and New York University, began his career as a conductor. He won his only Oscar in 1941 for The Devil and Daniel Webster, a fact that is a little perplexing when one considers that his groundbreaking musical scores for films like North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, and The Day the Earth Stood Still were never even nominated. Bernard Herrmann also worked extensively on television, where he composed some of the medium’s most highly recognizable music, the themes for The Twilight Zone and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Herrmann died unexpectedly, not long after finishing the score for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (for which he picked up a posthumous Oscar nomination).
Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) was one of the greatest movie directors of all time. As depicted in chapter 7, composer Miklós Róza used a theremin in Hitchcock’s hallucinatory classic, Spellbound (1945). Hitchcock famously paired with composer Bernard Herrmann, whose first meeting we have fictionalized. Their collaborations produced some of their most famous works. Herrmann also wrote the scores for Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Wrong Man (1956), and Marnie (1964). Hitchcock did not use a musical soundtrack for his classic The Birds (1963) but Bernard Herrmann acted a
s consultant on the creation of the electronically produced bird sounds, heard throughout the film. Their relationship came to an abrupt end during Herrmann’s scoring of Torn Curtain (1966). Reportedly, studio producers wanted a more pop- and jazz-influenced score, which Herrmann refused to deliver. Nor would he provide a suitable title tune for Paul Newman’s costar, Julie Andrews, to sing. As a result, Herrmann’s score was bumped from the film and John Addison was approached to write a new one. Despite the stellar cast, Torn Curtain became one of Hitchcock’s worst-reviewed films (reportedly Newman’s Method actor style led to clashes with the director). The director and composer never spoke again. In what was perhaps an even more inexplicable snub than that inflicted upon Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchcock never won the Academy Award for Best Director, although he was nominated five times.
The theremin is an early electronic musical instrument, designed about 1920 by Russian inventor Léon Theremin (born Lev Termen). Originally known as an etherophone, his device is the only musical instrument played without touching it. Its unique sound (once described as a cello lost in the fog and crying for help) results from two metal antennae attached to the wooden body of the instrument—which resembles an old radio receiver. One antenna is a straight vertical rod, usually situated on the right side (for right-handed players), and the other is a horizontal loop that extends out from the left side of the console. The antennae generate an electromagnetic field that extends about four feet around the device and the thereminist (necessitating that the instrument be separated from the rest of his orchestra). As the thereminist places his or her right hand closer to the pitch antenna, the pitch rises, while moving the left hand closer to the volume antenna causes the volume to decrease. These electrical signals, which vary as the thereminist moves his or her hands and fingers within the electric field, are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker. Generally typecast as a means to produce eerie or spooky sounds, the theremin played a major role in the soundtracks of Spellbound, The Thing (From Another World)—and Tim Burton’s comedic tragedy Ed Wood (with Lydia Kavina as thereminist).
Léon Theremin happened to be working on a proximity detector for the Soviets when he developed the idea for electronic music. He also invented a miniature eavesdropping device for the NKVD (which preceded the KGB). One such listening device (aka “the Thing”) was embedded in a carved wooden version of the Great Seal of the United States and presented to the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1945. It hung in his Moscow residence for seven years until it was discovered by accident (an accident of the Major Hendry kind). We have taken a little creative license in putting Theremin’s two most famous inventions together. Léon Theremin as master spy, however, is not fiction.
Pliny the Elder really did exist, really did travel the world as an explorer and writer, and was known for his extraordinary appetite for work. Many of his writings have survived because his nephew, Pliny the Younger, pleaded mercy for the early Christians during a time of political and social upheaval that ultimately eroded, from within, a civilization that was able to control water and steam, and was actually building multiple gearshift devices, at the time it began to fall. During the Dark Ages, Christian monks looked kindly upon the Plinys, copying and preserving many of their writings.
When depicted in fiction, Pliny the Elder has typically (and wrongly) been written as a buffoonish, decadent character. We have taken it as an honor, in this novel, to depict him in a manner more consistent with his writings, and what his nephew and others of his contemporaries wrote about him. We hope we have come closer to the real man, and how he would have reacted if thrust into the lost world of the Cerae.
From the writings that survive (notably his thirty-seven-volume Naturalis Historia), history has learned the legends of other lands, as told to Pliny the Elder during his travels. He was, for example, the explorer who gave the world its only detailed account of the strange celibate Essene cult, as related to him by another traveler, about the people who hid the library known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Historians and naturalists still argue about the extraordinary animals he described from many lands—“what was merely the mythology of some distant tribe, what was real?”
Even his death was extraordinary. The last words attributed to him in this novel were actually spoken by him, as recorded by his nephew in letters to his friend Tacitus—the full content of which can be read in Haraldur Sigurdsson’s excellent book about the eruption that buried Pompeii, Melting the Earth (Oxford University Press, 1999).
As we depicted, early during the second day of the increasingly violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Pliny the Younger was reportedly discovered by a friend to be behaving in a strange manner at his uncle’s estate. In his letters to Tacitus, Pliny the Younger mentions that this friend found his insistence on reading history and finishing an assignment from his uncle as quite odd. He never explained this obsession with his uncle’s papers, while two whole cities died within his view. In chapter 24, we provided a dramatized explanation for the famous Roman’s true and inexplicable behavior.
The Roman cavalryman whose skeleton was found at the marina of Pompeii’s sister city Herculaneum has, like Pliny the Elder, been maligned by modern, speculative history. Some fanciful “reconstructions” depict him as a hardened thief who at the last minute had a softer heart than indicated by his rugged features.
We have named him Proculus and, though he is the product of abstract fantasy, the skeleton of a man much like him actually was found, with the healed wounds we have described. He died under the physical conditions we have described, at the time and place we have described, with a gold inlaid silver scabbard for his sword.
In 2015, the Smithsonian Channel’s Mummies Alive series focused on gold and silver coins in Specimen E26’s side “pocket,” and on his fine tools, asking, though he appeared to have died in the act of rescue, “Was he a hero or a villain?”
The “thief/villain” speculation is based on a self-perpetuating dogma that Roman soldiers were poor and unskilled and, because this man was apparently wealthy, he must therefore have been looting as the fires of Vesuvius approached. In reality, his finely crafted sword spoke of success within the ranks, and within his extramilitary career. In accordance with historical writings reaching back to the time of Emperor Augustus (including Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, 2.93–94), there was much skill, education, and even wealth among the ranks, including Pliny the Elder himself—who, in reality as in this tale, was an admiral at the time of his death, and really did sail off toward the eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum, on an ill-fated mission of rescue.
Pliny the Elder did indeed record legends about strange wildlife in lost worlds, sometimes so fantastical that they must generally be regarded as the mythology of distant lands, or misunderstood descriptions of animals (like orangutans) known to biologists today.
The civilization we have called the Cerae are a fictional people, but Pliny did record in his earlier volume, Natural History (chapter 24: “Taprobane”), the fragmentary legends of a people with whom we have set out to make our own cautionary mythology resonate. Sometimes called “the Seres,” they were encountered during the reign of Emperor Claudius (Nero’s adoptive father). There are several spellings for these strange-eyed beings (blue-eyed, it was sometimes rumored), who communicated by “an uncouth sort of noise” and had flaxen hair. The Emodian Mountains (either the Himalayas or mountains nearby) “looked toward” these legendary people, believed by an earlier Roman visitor to have no true or comprehensible language by which to communicate thoughts (and hence the communication dilemmas faced by Severus, which later prove challenging even to Yanni’s exceptional skills). Their means of trade was also strange, and we have remained consistent with the ancient legend, according to which, goods were brought down from a distant spot behind the glacial barriers and left at the side of a river, to be removed by local inhabitants. They were said to be a shy and secretive people. Pliny the Elder wrote that those who went exploring ahead of him
, during prior decades, were mystified by the idea that this race, with its habit of leaving valuable goods behind, might in doing so be communicating some demand—perhaps to take these goods and stay away. The drop-offs were made to the river civilizations north of Taprobane (Sri Lanka).
Fictional our Cerae are, but we have made sure to maintain a certain amount of convergence with the Greek historian Strabo, who wrote in the fifth century b.c. (in Geographia, book 15, chapter 1) about a race in the same region able to control nature to such extent that they converted an ancient wasteland in and around the inhospitable mountains (south Tibet) into very fertile ground, and were able to extend their lives beyond two hundred years.
Pliny also wrote (as in Natural History 20, “The Seres”) that the race, whose homeland remained hidden, produced varieties of iron unequaled in quality. As legend told it, their forests were white with valuable fleece—which was combed from the trees and sent out to the world in secret and under cover of night. He emphasized (repeatedly) that they shunned direct trade “with the rest of mankind.” They were described to him as being “of inoffensive manners,” but also monstrous and capable of being provoked to great savagery.
Some ancient historians called them the Sieriz (pronounceable as “Ceres”); others named them the Sinae—later believed to be the Chinese (though there would thus have been some very misunderstood and exaggerated descriptions of the Chinese, with the white fleece combed from trees being, perhaps, a misunderstood account of silk harvested from the cocoons of tree-dwelling silkworms). For the sake of our story, Sieriz—Ceres—worked, in terms of describing a cold, hidden world where everything was white, yet fertile. Ceres was a Roman goddess of agriculture and fertility—formerly a Greek goddess, Demeter (a name you may recognize from an ill-fated submarine in Hell’s Gate).
