Pompeii

by Harris, Robert

  ‘My records!’ protested Pliny.

  ‘Alexion has your records, admiral.’ Attilius had him by one arm and the captain by the other. He was immensely heavy. He stumbled on the last step and nearly fell full-length but they managed to retrieve him and lugged him along the deck towards the open trap-door that led down to the rowing stations as the air turned to rock. ‘Make way for the admiral!’ panted Torquatus and then they almost threw him down the ladder. Alexion went next with the precious papers, treading on the admiral’s shoulders, then Attilius jumped down in a shower of pumice, and finally Torquatus, slamming the trap behind them.

  Vespera

  [20:02 hours]

  ‘During [the first] phase the vent radius was probably of the order of 100 metres. As the eruption continued, inevitable widening of the vent permitted still higher mass eruption rates. By the evening of the 24th, the column height had increased. Progressively deeper levels within the magma chamber were tapped, until after about seven hours the more mafic grey pumice was reached. This was ejected at about 1.5 million tonnes per second, and carried by convection to maximum heights of around 33 kilometres.’

  Volcanoes: A Planetary Perspective

  In the stifling heat and the near-darkness beneath the Minerva’s decks they crouched and listened to the drumming of the stones above them. The air was rank with the sweat and breath of two hundred sailors. Occasionally, a foreign voice would cry out in some unrecognisable tongue only to be silenced by a harsh shout from one of the officers. A man near Attilius moaned repeatedly in Latin that it was the end of the world – and that, indeed, was what it felt like to the engineer. Nature had reversed herself so that they were drowning beneath rock in the middle of the sea, drifting in the depths of night during the bright hours of the day. The ship was rocking violently but none of the oars was moving. There was no purpose to any activity for they had no idea of the direction in which they were pointing. There was nothing to do but endure, each man huddled in his own thoughts.

  How long this went on, Attilius could not calculate. Perhaps one hour; perhaps two. He was not even sure where he was below decks. He knew that he was clinging to a narrow wooden gantry that seemed to run the length of the ship, with the double-banks of sailors crammed on benches on either side. He could hear Pliny wheezing somewhere close, Alexion snuffling like a child. Torquatus was entirely silent. The incessant hammering of the pumice fall, sharp to begin with as it rattled on the timber of the deck, gradually became more muffled, as pumice fell on pumice, sealing them off from the world. And that, for him, was the worst thing – the sense of this mass slowly pressing down on them, burying them alive. As time passed he began to wonder how long the joists of the deck would hold, or whether the sheer weight of what was above them would push them beneath the waves. He tried to console himself with the thought that pumice was light: the engineers in Rome, when they were constructing a great dome, sometimes mixed it into the cement in place of rock and fragments of brick. Nevertheless he gradually became aware that the ship was starting to list and very soon after that a cry of panic went up from some of the sailors to his right that water was pouring through the oar-holes.

  Torquatus shouted at them roughly to be quiet then called down the gantry to Pliny that he needed to take a party of men above decks to try to shovel off the rockfall.

  ‘Do what you have to do, captain,’ replied the admiral. His voice was calm. ‘This is Pliny!’ he suddenly bellowed above the roar of the storm. ‘I expect every man to bear himself like a Roman soldier! And when we return to Misenum, you will all be rewarded, I promise you!’

  There was some jeering from the darkness.

  ‘If we return, more like!’

  ‘It was you who got us into the mess!’

  ‘Silence!’ yelled Torquatus. ‘Engineer, will you help me?’ He had mounted the short ladder to the trapdoor and was trying to push it open but the weight of the pumice made it hard to lift. Attilius groped his way along the gantry and joined him on the ladder, holding on to it with one hand, heaving with the other at the wooden panel above his head. Together they raised it slowly, releasing a cascade of debris that bounced off their heads and clattered on to the timbers below. ‘I need twenty men!’ ordered Torquatus. ‘You five banks of oars – follow me.’

  Attilius climbed out after him into the whirl of flying pumice. There was a strange almost brownish light, as in a sandstorm, and as he straightened Torquatus grabbed his arm and pointed. It took Attilius a moment to see what he meant, but then he glimpsed it too – a row of winking yellow lights, showing faintly through the murk. Pompeii, he thought – Corelia!

  ‘We’ve drifted beneath the worst of it and come in close to the coast!’ shouted the captain. ‘The gods alone know where! We’ll try to run her aground! Help me at the helm!’ He turned and pushed the nearest of the oarsmen back towards the trapdoor. ‘Get back below and tell the others to row – to row for their lives! The rest of you – hoist the sail!’

  He ran along the side of the ship towards the stern and Attilius followed, his head lowered, his feet sinking into the heavy blanket of white pumice that covered the deck like snow. They were so low in the water he felt he could almost have stepped down on to the carpet of rock and walked ashore. He clambered up on to the poop deck and with Torquatus he seized the great oar that steered the liburnian. But even with two men swinging on it the blade wouldn’t move against the floating mass.

  Dimly, he could see the shape of the sail beginning to rise before them. He heard the crack as it started to fill, and at the same time there was a ripple of movement along the banks of oars. The helm shuddered slightly beneath his hands. Torquatus pushed and he heaved, his feet scrabbling for a purchase in the loose stone, and slowly he felt the wooden shaft begin to move. For a while the liburnian seemed to list, motionless, and then a gust of wind propelled them forwards. He heard the drum beating again below, the oars settling into a steady rhythm, and from the gloom ahead the shape of the coast began to emerge – a breakwater, a sandy beach, a row of villas with torches lit along the terraces, people moving at the edge of the sea, where waves were pounding the shore, lifting the boats in the shallows and flinging them back on land. Whatever place this was, he realised with disappointment, it was not Pompeii.

  Suddenly the rudder jumped and moved so freely he thought it must have snapped and Torquatus swung it hard, aiming them towards the beach. They had broken clear of the clinging pumice and were into the rolling waves, the force of the sea and the wind propelling them directly at the shore. He saw the crowd of people on the beach, all trying to load their possessions into the boats, turn to look at them in astonishment, saw them break and scatter as the liburnian bore down upon them. Torquatus cried out, ‘Brace yourselves!’ and an instant later the hull scraped rock and Attilius went flying down on to the main deck, his landing cushioned by the foot-thick mattress of stone.

  He lay there for a moment, winded, his cheek pressed to the warm, dry pumice, as the ship rolled beneath him. He heard the shouts of the sailors coming up from below decks, and the splashes as they jumped into the surf. He raised himself and saw the sail being lowered, the anchor flung over the side. Men with ropes were running up the beach, trying to find places to secure the ship. It was twilight – not the twilight thrown out by the eruption, which they seemed to have sailed straight through, but the natural dusk of early evening. The shower of stones was light and intermittent and the noise as they scattered over the deck and plopped into the sea was lost in the boom of the surf and the roar of the wind. Pliny had emerged from the trapdoor and was stepping carefully through the pumice, supported by Alexion – a solid and dignified figure in the midst of the panic all around him. If he felt any fear he did not show it and as Attilius approached he raised his arm almost cheerfully.

  ‘Well, this is a piece of good fortune, engineer. Do you see where we are? I know this place well. This is Stabiae – a most pleasant town in which to spend an evening. Torquatus!’ He becko
ned to the captain. ‘I suggest we stay here for the night.’

  Torquatus regarded him with incredulity. ‘We have no choice about it, admiral. No ship can be launched against this wind. The question is: how soon will it carry that wall of rock upon us?’

  ‘Perhaps it won’t,’ said Pliny. He gazed across the surf at the lights of the little town, rising into the low hillside. It was separated from the beach by the coastal road that ran all around the bay. The highway was clogged with the same weary traffic of refugees that Attilius had encountered earlier at Herculaneum. On the shore itself, perhaps a hundred people had congregated with their possessions, hoping to escape by sea, but unable to do more than gaze hopelessly at the crashing waves. One fat and elderly man stood apart, surrounded by his household, occasionally throwing up his hands in lamentation, and Attilius felt a stir of recognition. Pliny had noticed him, too. ‘That’s my friend, Pomponianus. The poor old fool,’ he said, sadly. ‘A nervous fellow at the best of times. He’ll need our comfort. We must wear our bravest faces. Assist me to the shore.’

  Attilius jumped down into the sea, followed by Torquatus. The water was up to their waists at one moment, at the next it was swirling around their necks. It was no easy task to take off a man of the admiral’s weight and condition. With Alexion’s help Pliny finally got down on to his backside and shuffled forwards and as they took his arms he slipped into the water. They managed to keep his head above the surface, and then, in an impressive show of self-control, he shrugged off their support and waded ashore unaided.

  ‘A stubborn old fool,’ said Torquatus, as they watched him march up the beach and embrace Pomponianus. ‘A magnificent, courageous, stubborn old fool. He’s almost killed us twice and I swear he’ll try again before he’s finished.’

  Attilius glanced along the coast towards Vesuvius but he could not see much in the gathering darkness except for the luminous white lines of the waves running in to batter the coast, and beyond them the inky black of the falling rock. Another line of red lightning split the sky. He said, ‘How far are we from Pompeii?’

  ‘Three miles,’ answered Torquatus. ‘Perhaps less. It looks like they’re taking the worst of it, poor wretches. This wind – the men had better seek some shelter.’

  He began wading towards the shore leaving Attilius alone.

  If Stabiae was three miles downwind of Pompeii, and Vesuvius lay five miles the other side of the city, then this monstrous cloud must be eight miles long. Eight miles long, and – what? – at least five miles wide, given how far it reached out into the sea. Unless Corelia had fled very early she would have had no chance of escape.

  He stood there for a while, buffeted by the sea, until at length he heard the admiral calling his name. Helplessly he turned and made his way through the restless shallows, up on to the beach to join the rest.

  Pomponianus had a villa on the sea-front only a short walk along the road and Pliny was suggesting they should all return to it. Attilius could hear them arguing as he approached. Pomponianus, panicky, was objecting in his high voice that if they left the beach they would lose their chance of a place in a boat. But Pliny waved that away. ‘No sense in waiting here,’ he said. His voice was urgent. ‘Besides, you can always sail with us, when the wind and sea are more favourable. Come, Livia – take my arm.’ And with Pomponianus’s wife on one side and Alexion on the other, and with the household slaves strung out behind them – lugging marble busts, carpets, chests and candelabra – he led them up on to the road.

  He was hurrying as fast as he could, his cheeks puffed out, and Attilius thought, he knows – he knows from his observations what is about to happen. Sure enough they had just reached the gates of the villa when it came on them again like a summer storm – first a few heavy drops, as a warning, and then the air exploded over the myrtle bushes and the cobbled courtyard. Attilius could feel someone’s body pressing into his from behind, he pushed into the man in front and together they tumbled through the door and into the darkened, deserted villa. People were wailing, knocking blindly into the furniture. He heard a woman’s scream and a crash. The disembodied face of a slave appeared, illuminated from below by an oil lamp, and then the face vanished and he heard the familiar wumph as a torch was lit. They huddled in the comfort of the light, masters and slaves alike, as the pumice clattered on to the terracotta roof of the villa and smashed into the ornamental gardens outside. Someone went off with the oil lamp to fetch more torches and some candles, and the slaves went on lighting them long after there was sufficient light, as if somehow the brighter the scene, the more safe they would be. The crowded hall soon had an almost festive feel to it, and that was when Pliny, with his arm draped round the quivering shoulders of Pomponianus, declared that he would like to eat.

  The admiral had no belief in an afterlife: ‘Neither body nor mind has any more sensation after death than it had before birth.’ Nevertheless, he put on a display of bravery over the next few hours which none who survived the evening would afterwards forget. He had long ago resolved that when death came for him he would endeavour to meet it in the spirit of Marcus Sergius, whom he had crowned in the Natural History as the most courageous man who had ever lived – wounded twenty-three times in the course of his campaigns, left crippled, twice captured by Hannibal and held in chains every day for twenty months; Sergius had ridden into his final battle with a right hand made of iron, a substitute for the one he had lost. He was not as successful as Scipio or Caesar, but what did that matter? ‘All other victors truly have conquered men,’ Pliny had written, ‘but Sergius vanquished fortune also.’

  ‘To vanquish fortune’ – that was what a man should strive to do. Accordingly, as the slaves prepared his dinner, he told an astonished Pomponianus that he would first like to take a bath and he waddled off, escorted by Alexion, to soak in a cold tub. He removed his filthy clothes and clambered into the clear water, submerging his head completely into a silent world. Surfacing, he announced that he wished to dictate a few more observations – like the engineer, he reckoned the dimensions of the manifestation at roughly eight miles by six – then allowed himself to be patted dry by one of Pomponianus’s body-slaves, anointed in saffron-oil, and dressed in one of his friend’s clean togas.

  Five of them sat down to dinner – Pliny, Pomponianus, Livia, Torquatus and Attilius – not and ideal number from the point of etiquette, and the din of the pumice on the roof made conversation difficult. Still, at least it meant that he had a couch to himself and space to stretch out. The table and the couches had been carried in from the dining room and set up in the sparkling hall. And if the food was not up to much – the fires were out and the best the kitchens could come up with were cold cuts of meat, fowl and fish – then Pomponianus, at Pliny’s gentle prompting, had made up for it with the wine. He produced a Falernian, two hundred years old, a vintage from the consulship of Lucius Opimius. It was his final jar (‘Not much point in hanging on to it now,’ he observed gloomily).

  The liquid in the candlelight was the colour of rough honey and after it was decanted but before it was mixed with a younger wine – for it was too bitter to be drunk undiluted – Pliny took it from the slave and inhaled it, catching in its musty aroma the whiff of the old Republic: of men of the stamp of Cato and Sergius; of a city fighting to become an empire; of the dust of the Campus Martius; of trial by iron and fire.

  The admiral did most of the talking and he tried to keep it light, avoiding all mention, for example, of Rectina and the precious library of the Villa Calpurnia, or the fate of the fleet, which he supposed must be broken up by now and scattered all along the coast. (That alone might be enough to force his suicide, he realised: he had put to sea without waiting for imperial authority; Titus might not be forgiving.) Instead he chose to talk about the wine. He knew a lot about wine. Julia called him ‘a wine bore’. But what did he care? To bore was the privilege of age and rank. If it had not been for wine his heart would have packed in years ago.

  ‘The records te
ll us that the summer in the consulship of Opimius was very much like this one. Long hot days filled with endless sunshine – “ripe”, as the vintners call it.’ He swirled the wine in his glass and sniffed it. ‘Who knows? Perhaps, two centuries from now, men will be drinking the vintage from this year of ours, and wondering what we were like. Our skill. Our courage.’ The thunder of the barrage seemed to be increasing. Somewhere wood splintered. There was a crash of breaking tiles. Pliny looked around the table at his fellow diners – at Pomponianus, who was wincing at the roof and clinging to the hand of his wife; at Livia, who managed to give him a small, tight smile (she always had been twice the man her husband was); at Torquatus, who was frowning at the floor; and finally at the engineer, who had not said a word throughout the meal. He felt warmly towards the aquarius – a man of science, after his own heart, who had sailed in search of knowledge.

  ‘Let us drink a toast,’ he suggested, ‘to the genius of Roman engineering – to the Aqua Augusta, which gave us warning of what was to happen, if only we had had the wit to heed it!’ He raised his glass towards Attilius. ‘The Aqua Augusta!’

  ‘The Aqua Augusta!’

  They drank, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. And it was a good wine, thought the admiral, smacking his lips. A perfect blend of the old and the young. Like himself and the engineer. And if it proved to be his last? Well then: it was an appropriate wine to end on.

  When he announced that he was going to bed he could see that they assumed he must be joking. But no, he assured them, he was serious. He had trained himself to fall asleep at will – even upright, in a saddle, in a freezing German forest. This? This was nothing! ‘Your arm, engineer, if you will be so kind.’ He wished them all good night.