Pliny's Warning

by Nicholson, Anne Maria

  ‘Look, Frances,’ Marcello interrupts. ‘There’s the old observatory, the oldest one in the world. Now it’s a museum.’

  They’ve left behind the motley clusters of apartments, modern villas and the occasional restaurant. An elegant nineteenth century classical pink villa stands alone on the pine tree-studded slopes.

  ‘And there’s the old 1944 lava flow beyond the trees. Want to stop?’

  She nods and he pulls off the road. Halfway up the mountain, the air is still and quiet, disturbed occasionally by a tourist bus careering past.

  Frances is eager to see the lava flow. ‘Let’s go over.’

  The three of them scuttle like crabs over rocks and through scrub towards a massive river of solidified lava clinging to the lower flanks of the volcano. The source of the mass of dark grey rock is high up, out of sight. It stretches far below them like fast-flowing rapids that have been snap frozen.

  ‘It’s hard to imagine what this was like when it was hot magma. It must have been awesome.’ Frances bends to touch the rough surface of the rock which extends for hundreds of metres across.

  ‘All the more so because it happened in the middle of the Second World War. The Allied forces had just taken over Naples from the Germans and the Americans occupied the old observatory back there,’ Marcello responds.

  ‘Was it operating?’ Frances asks.

  ‘Sort of, there was one vulcanologist from Naples University, Professor Giuseppe Imbo. He’s long dead now but he’s certainly gone down in our history. The Americans tried to get him to leave but he stood his ground saying the volcano was very active and as he was the only one who could work the seismographs, he should stay.’

  ‘He was a hero. And it’s just as well he stayed,’ Riccardo continues. ‘We have all his records of the eruption over five days. He worked there on his own, going from the observatory up there to the crater and watching the whole thing build up. When the lava flow started, it was one river. On the fifth day this big flow started and then split into three rivers.’

  ‘Frances, come over here.’ Marcello is pointing down the valley. ‘There are the towns that were destroyed by the lava. Some of them suffered worse than others. Nearly every house in San Sebastiano was destroyed and all the crops.’

  ‘And the people?’

  ‘About 40 people died, mainly old people. Stuck in their houses. It was easy enough for most people to get away.’

  Frances peers into the distance, trying to picture this deadly molten flow infiltrating the towns, which are built up so densely they almost roll into one. The fields separating them are cultivated with grapes, olives and fruit trees, concealing the destruction beneath a verdant cover, as though it had never happened.

  ‘It must have been terrifying…’ she adds, half to herself.

  ‘They were bad times for everyone,’ Marcello tells her. ‘My grandparents were living there when it happened, just teenagers. My grandfather’s still alive. You might want to meet him?’

  She nodded. ‘I would, very much.’

  ‘I’ll take you one day. He’s told me lots of stories about that time. One of the rumours was that the Americans started the eruption by dropping all their leftover bombs into the crater after their raids on the Nazi hiding places in the mountains. Certainly the people of Naples started to think they were cursed. First the Germans, then the Allies, then Vesuvius. Nonno, my grandfather, said a group of women stormed into a brothel where the foreign soldiers used to go. They dragged out the naked prostitutes and threw them onto the street, telling them to get down on their knees and do penance for bringing the wrath of the volcano down on the city.’

  Riccardo laughs. ‘Ah yes, the wrath of God. We heard that a lot in Stromboli too. It’s the answer to everything. Of course it’s not so easy for us scientists, because we get the blame as well, mainly for not being able to predict what God is going to do next!’

  ‘It’s the same with volcanoes the world over,’ Frances replies. ‘It’s natural for people to blame it on the supernatural when they don’t have the knowledge to find a scientific explanation.’

  As they clamber back towards the car, Frances looks back to the towns below. ‘What happens to them if it goes again? How do they get out? What about your grandfather, Marcello?’

  ‘Mio Dio! God help us!’

  ‘It will be disaster on an unprecedented scale,’ Riccardo adds. ‘Nearly a million people live around Vesuvius and millions more in and around Naples. A lava flow is nothing compared to what would happen if there was a super eruption. Getting them out is the nub of the problem; you know as well as I do, you can’t stop the volcano.’

  ‘Yes, but no one believes it will happen to them, least of all my grandfather. They think the saints will protect them!’

  ‘Come on, let’s go up the top before it gets too late,’ Riccardo says. ‘We’ll give you a falcon’s view from the top and you’ll see the scale of the problem for yourself.’

  The road snakes up the mountain. Before long they pass above the tree line, overtaking dozens of tourist buses, and pull into a large car park. Riccardo flashes an observatory pass at the attendant who looks at it cursorily and waves their vehicle through. A few people are buying souvenirs from the row of small shops that lead to the gateway to the summit: bottles of Lacryma Cristi, the local white wine made from Vesuvius grapes; curios made from lava—ashtrays, owls, pendants; and the inevitable calendars and tea towels.

  They start the ascent, overtaking dawdling tourists puffing up the winding gravel track. Others are returning from the summit, among them two teenage girls in tight jeans, limping in sandals made for the high street rather than a mountain. The air is punctuated with the accents of a dozen or more languages.

  Soon they are high enough to see into the vast empty crater. The steamy gas from a few fumaroles drifts over the grey and brown craggy walls that have seen dozens of explosions over thousands of years. Frances looks at the mountain differently to her previous visits, when she helped install some of the new-model acoustic monitors on its flanks to pick up the vibrations of the volcano.

  This has the appearance of a sleeper, almost serene, so different to the angry craters she has traversed, spewing boiling water, mud and lava. Yet surely it’s a deceiver.

  The three of them gaze at the summit of Vesuvius, its peak nesting inside the caldera of the much older Monte Somma, that exploded in 79 AD with such force it blew more than half of the mountain away. It’s quiet now but more than any of the visitors around them, they are aware of the time-bomb ticking deep below them, the vast lake of magma stretching some twenty kilometres across to Campi Flegrei.

  ‘Silent and deadly,’ Frances utters, leaning against a safety fence and staring into the giant caldera. ‘You could fit a lot of garbage in here,’ she adds. ‘What a preposterous idea!’

  Marcello leans so close to her their arms touch. ‘You’ve got a fresh view of this place, Frances. How much warning do you believe we’ll have of a big eruption?’

  She feels comfortable with him, attracted, and doesn’t move away. But his question unsettles her. Everyone asks but few are prepared to answer.

  ‘I agree with the pessimists that it could be as little as a day or two. What do you call it?’ she asks Riccardo, on her other side. ‘The worst-case scenario?’

  ‘Breve tempo. Soon,’ he replies.

  ‘Yes, whatever soon means,’ Frances smiles at him. ‘I know the official line is one or two weeks and we’d all like to think that was the case. But this reminds me very much of Mt St Helens. When it blew its top in 1980, with no warning, it was catastrophic…yet it was very closely watched. That was years before I worked there but the older scientists never got over the enormity and the speed of the eruption. One of their friends was monitoring it kilometres away from the mountain and was killed instantly. And…I’ve had some close calls myself and lost…’ The last sentence she almost whispers and they don’t seem to have heard her.

  ‘Well, you’ve already see
n how our esteemed leader won’t hear a bar of it!’ Riccardo hisses. ‘How do we break through a wall like that?’

  ‘We’ll find a way,’ Marcello smiles. ‘Science will win over politics.’ He walks ahead, the breeze ruffling his dark brown hair. ‘Come on, hurry up!’

  At the top, the vista expands around them; the Bay of Naples sparkles blue below, stretching from Sorrento in the south to Cape Misena and Baia in Campi Flegrei to the north. Beyond, the mystical Ischia, Procida and Capri rise out of the sea, each island blanketed in a ghostly haze. The homes of millions of people are squashed into the metropolis, from the ship-filled harbour, extending in an unbroken sweep, to the villages around the volcano.

  ‘It’s the most densely populated city in Europe and those so-called expressways are always clogged or at a standstill. Getting out will be almost impossible if there’s an eruption.’ Riccardo looks bleak.

  ‘There’s Herculaneum, down there towards the water. Everyone there was killed in the same eruption in 79 AD that took out Pompeii. They died first. There were six surges from the volcano. One of them hit the town at one in the morning and the hot gas and ash killed them instantly.’

  ‘Is it right on the water?’ Frances asks. ‘I can’t quite make it out.’

  ‘It used to be but the old town is hemmed in now so it’s hard to see from here and the coast has extended a bit beyond it. But we’re still finding skeletons there from two thousand years ago.’

  ‘No!’ Frances exclaims.

  ‘Oh yes…we found hundreds, huddled in boatsheds trying to get out to sea. They died in seconds.’ Marcello takes her by the arm and leads her further along the path.

  ‘And there’s Pompeii over there,’ Marcello points southwards. ‘If you look closely you can see the ruins of the old city in the distance. Follow the line of that old road you can see and it will lead you to it.’

  As Frances strains to pick out the remnants of the once-thriving Roman city, she can just make out the shapes of the muddy brown ruins shimmering in a green oasis abutting a modern town.

  ‘And, of course, like Herculaneum, it wasn’t the lava that killed everyone, it was the ash and the gas. Most people suffocated.’ Riccardo’s face is set. ‘The problem we’re facing is that the population believes lava is the threat from Vesuvius and that suits the politicians. They allow development here and turn a blind eye to illegal, abusivismo, development. The real danger is much more lethal; pyroclastic flows and massive falls of ash and gas.’

  ‘How far is Pompeii from here?’ Frances asks.

  ‘About ten kilometres. It’s hard to believe everyone was killed instantly but the force of the eruption was the same as thousands of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima. And if you think that’s bad, come and take a look at this.’

  Riccardo and Marcello guide Frances along the path to face away from the sea.

  ‘That’s the city of Nola.’ Riccardo points east. ‘It’s twice as far from Vesuvius as Pompeii but that’s where Marcello and I found the oldest skeletons and the remains of Bronze Age villages. They were wiped out by the Avellino eruption fifteen hundred years before Pompeii.’

  ‘Oh yes, Bronze Age woman from the restaurant,’ Frances adds. ‘When can we go there?’

  ‘Soon, I hope,’ Marcello says, and Frances sees him exchange a look with Riccardo.

  ‘What? A problem?’

  ‘We seem to attract problems,’ Riccardo replies.

  Marcello nods. ‘We tried to go back to the excavation site last week and it was locked up. We’ve been facing resistance from the administrator every time we try to go there. The government is paying top money to some scientists to put a spin on it all and assure people that it’s safe. The last thing they want is to scare people and face a revolt. You can see why we’re so unpopular as the bearers of bad news. But the reality is that if there’s another giant eruption, every town you can see from up here could be obliterated, including Naples.’

  The wind picks up and they join a busload of Australian and New Zealand tourists walking back down the path, laughing and chatting, blissfully unaware of any threat. Yet, the scale of the danger is beyond what Frances had imagined when she took on this job. Can an early warning system really do much here? There would be no hope for the hundreds of thousands of people living below, let alone others further away. ‘They put so much trust in what we scientists tell them, as if we can control what nature does,’ she thinks to herself, then turns to Riccardo. ‘What are you going to do about your research?’

  ‘Fight. And then fight harder.’

  Marcello puts his hand on her shoulder and squeezes it. ‘We do have the law on our side, for what that’s worth. We’re hoping some of the politicians in Rome who are beyond the reach of Il Sistema might run with this. Under the Italian constitution, scientists have a right to independent research and to publish and discuss their results. So, yes, we will just keep going.’

  Finding their car, they follow a procession of buses down the mountain.

  ‘We’re going to meet some friends for an aperitivo. Do you want to come?’ Marcello asks.

  She pauses for a moment. Once she wouldn’t have hesitated to accept such an invitation, but this time she pulls back. ‘Thanks but I think I’ll have an early night. Just drop me at the station and I’ll make my own way home.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  The market leading to the Montesanto station in the heart of the historic centre of Naples has woken up from the siesta. In the twisting cobblestone lanes, afternoon shoppers examine glistening displays of fresh fish and shellfish. Boxes of fruit and vegetables piled on the pavement outside tiny shops vie for attention; shiny purple aubergines, stop-light-red capsicums, jungle-green zucchinis and egg-shaped tomatoes are side by side with bulging bunches of red and white grapes and watermelons, some cut open to reveal their glistening pink interiors.

  Frances points to the red grapes and pays for them. She moves along the market and pauses to buy some socks from one of the stallholders.

  ‘Buona sera, signorina,’ the Pakistani man greets her.

  She smiles at him and passes him a five euro note, enough to buy three pairs of cotton socks.

  ‘Jewellery. From two euro?’

  ‘Another day,’ she says perusing a kaleidoscope of trinkets—bangles, beads and brooches—from the sub-continent.

  She rides an escalator to the funicular and joins a group of people waiting on the platform to ride to the upper reaches of the city. The modern cable car arrives at the bottom a minute later. Two musicians follow Frances on board and the doors have barely closed when the violinist and the accordion player burst into a tango. Their faces have been kissed by the Naples sun for at least forty summers and the two men play together with a practised and passionate ease.

  Frances notices the other passengers escaping momentarily from their daily worries. They’re listening closely, tapping feet, nodding and smiling. The mood is contagious and she feels her fear of the volcano lift as the music takes over. A little girl of five or so stands and dances around her seat. Her mother laughs but her older sister, a serious-looking girl of about eight wearing glasses, stares at her lap, embarrassed.

  The younger girl doesn’t care. She jiggles around, singing and dancing, her face alive with happiness. When the playing stops she sinks laughing onto her seat, prodding her silent sister. The accordion player starts again while the violinist walks up and down the carriage, proffering a cup. Frances drops in a euro coin which jangles with the rest.

  When she alights on Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the street has also come alive and she resists an urge to tango along the pavement. On a whim, she buys a pot of crimson cyclamens from a roadside stall and strokes the tiny blooms, so perfect they could be made of silk.

  Pasquale is playing when she climbs the stairs and she hesitates, wondering whether to knock, but the exertion of the Vesuvius climb keeps her moving home. She opens the shutters in her apartment, where the light is fading fast. She whisks some eggs
and makes a cheese omelette and a green salad, pours a glass of falanghina and flops onto the sofa to eat, relishing her simple meal and the sweet crisp white wine.

  Hearing voices in the lane below, she leans outside the window to see who’s there. Darkness cloaks their identities. Under a light further on, a street regular, a blonde-wigged transvestite, waits for some evening trade, cigarette glowing like a welcome beacon, and Frances closes the shutters on the Italian night.

  Realizing day will have dawned in New Zealand, she turns on her computer and clicks onto the Internet site for White Island. Instantly, photos appear, a chequerboard of images, each slightly different, of swirling white steam covering the rugged brown of the main crater. The images would have been taken just minutes earlier on cameras she had installed herself to record the hydrothermal activity.

  Frances fingers the keys nervously, her guts churning, as though this simple action could erase the memory of the time when the island was a raging hellhole. How simple it would be to push delete and pretend it hadn’t happened. She taps the keys to see more images. For now, all is quiet.

  Frances yawns, glad the apartment is quiet and she can have an early night. She doesn’t expect to see Riccardo back for hours, if at all.

  But sleep evades her and she thinks of Tori, and for the first time in ages, wishes he was lying there with her. They had found each other when neither was looking, both feeling like the flotsam and jetsam of relationships that had run their course. They had met in New Zealand, while embroiled on different sides of a bitter conflict. She had come from Mt St Helens to Mt Ruapehu to ramp up the early warning monitors. Just as well too, as it was only a matter of months before the volcano emitted a massive lahar of water and mud from the crater lake. Had the system not functioned, there could have been a repeat of the 1950s Tangiwai train disaster that had stolen so many lives, including her baby sister’s.

  Tori Maddison was the Maori leader who had repelled moves to bulldoze the summit of the mountain. The volcano was sacred to his tribe, he’d said, and was part of its mana, its power. There should be no interference. Against the odds, the wishes of the indigenous people were heard. And against the odds, the two of them, from such different worlds, fell deeply in love. For a time, they floated together in warm harmony. But when they parted she felt they were both treading water, just to stop drowning.