They walk in file, feet crunching on the stones. Frances sinks to her knees and reaches down into a hole beneath the foundation stones. She scoops up a handful of small white oval stones and smells them. She reaches down for more. They’re distinctively honey-combed, light and powdery. She runs her hand up and down the layer of loose stones, maybe a metre deep. Her hunch was right. Here below the castle is an ancient layer of volcanic pumice and ash. And if the ruins are Roman, then this happened long before the Pompeii eruption.
She breathes faster, coming to grips with the consequences of the discovery. This is the evidence Marcello’s been looking for…proof that the winds have previously carried an eruption right into the heart of Naples. If it happened again today, there would be no survivors. She runs her hand down the layer, so deep it would have been lethal. Details of other eruptions flood her mind and she remembers Mt Pelée in Martinique. Everyone who was killed lay under just eight inches of debris, much less than this. And if it has happened here before…
‘Signorina,’ the guide interrupts. Lost in her thoughts, she starts when she hears his voice. ‘We must go now.’ He taps her shoulder. ‘You really shouldn’t be here without permission.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Outside the castle, the sea breeze ruffles her hair as she rings Marcello.
‘Ah, Frances. I’ve finished at the lab. Are you ready?’
She resists the temptation to blurt out the discovery. ‘Yes. I’m at the Castel Nuovo. Can you park your car and meet me at the entrance? There’s something you need to see there before we go to Nola.’
‘Sure. Is Riccardo coming?’
‘No, he’s sleeping.’
More African traders have set up shop on the path in front of her. One of them sees her and begins to spruik. ‘A watch, signorina? New design.’ Tall and slender, he opens his jacket to show an array of twenty or more. She smiles at him, holds up her wrist to show her own watch and keeps walking.
The cello music drifts around the piazza and a new audience of tourists has spilled off a red double-decker bus, surrounding Pasquale. Hundreds of people mill around the square, happy faces oblivious to any danger. None of them is included in any emergency evacuation plan. Naples is simply not on the authorities’ radar.
Marcello approaches her, walking quickly. He kisses her on both cheeks then lightly on the lips. ‘A third for luck,’ he smiles.
She takes his arm. ‘My turn to show you something.’
The guide does a double-take when he spots her. ‘Just showing my colleague.’
He waves her past. ‘Don’t forget to write for the permission, signorina.’
‘What is he talking about?’
‘Patience, Marcello, patience.’ She leads him to the glass flooring in the basement. ‘There, what do you think?’
Marcello peers into the gloom of the foundations. He glances at her, frowning, then kneels to look closer. She’s amused to see him repeat her own movements. Crawling from one area to another, rubbing his eyes as if he can’t quite believe what he is seeing. ‘Pumice? Here in the middle of the city?’
She nods. ‘I persuaded the guide to take me down to touch it. Definitely pumice.’
Marcello clutches his forehead. ‘My God, Frances. This is what I feared. This is the proof that the Avellino eruption was much bigger than anyone imagined. It covered the city and it could easily happen again.’
She takes his arm. ‘Look at the skeletons. Were they part of it?’
‘No, much later,’ he says dismissively. ‘I can tell they’re more recent and they’re lying several layers above the pumice.’ Marcello is agitated. ‘I’d like to get down there and have a proper look. But the day is disappearing. Do you still want to go to Nola?’
‘Yes, very much. And the guard is insisting we get permission before he lets us down there again.’
They drive north of Naples along the expressway, then skirt east around Vesuvius. Heavy trucks hogging all the lanes slow them but soon they turn off into a dusty road far beyond the metropolis.
‘There are two Bronze Age village sites,’ Marcello tells her. ‘The smaller one is just ahead.’
They pull off the road and park near what looks like a construction site. Earthmoving equipment is lined up like a military armoury but there’s no sign of any workers.
‘They’re itching to get in here and destroy it,’ he mutters. ‘We’re fighting to save the excavations from the bulldozers. They want to build a supermarket here.’
He retrieves two safety helmets fitted with lights, puts one on and hands the other to her. ‘No lights there. We’ll need these.’
She follows Marcello over a low timber fence to a dug-out area the size of a small football field. They peer over the edge into a labyrinth of holes lined with scaffolding. He beckons her and they switch on their lights and carefully descend a ladder. The smell of the brown earth is almost overwhelming. Going underground has always made her feel trapped but she keeps going down until she reaches a point where the layer of earth changes to pumice.
Marcello is waiting on a platform and grabs her hand. As her eyes acclimatize, she can make out odd horseshoe-shaped structures. ‘What you’re looking at is the remains of a village that flourished until it was buried by the eruption of 1780 BC.’
She struggles in the poor light but can see half-formed rooms and doorways.
‘We’ve removed most of the objects. The skeletons you’ve seen, also bones of animals: goats, pigs, sheep, cattle and dogs.’
‘Like a primitive Pompeii,’ she says.
He nods. ‘None of the artwork, but cooking pots, plates and fossils of food, nuts, grains and olives.’
Marcello lowers himself into a trench up to his shoulders. His headlamp shines a ghostly light inside one of the rooms. ‘Come down and have a closer look,’ he urges her. ‘I’ll help you.’
‘No. I can see enough from here.’ Frances shivers. The pit of her stomach is churning and her head is spinning.
Marcello moves to a doorway across the trench, where his light rests on a rough piece of furniture. ‘A table. It was set for a meal, but no one stayed to eat it. They must have heard the volcano erupting and fled.’
Frances sits down and puts her head in her hands. The cold stones and earth press into her bottom. ‘Marcello, can we go up, please? I feel faint.’
He heaves himself out of the trench, grasps her arm and helps her back to the ladder. She breathes deeply to combat her nausea and climbs steadily out of the hole. When she reaches the top she flops onto her back on the ground.
‘Hey, are you all right?’
‘I will be in a minute, I just need a bit of air. I hate being underground, it makes me feel as if I’ve been buried alive.’
He sits next to her and puts his arm around her.
‘I saw a horror film once,’ she says, breathing more lightly. ‘It was about being buried alive. The girl was kidnapped at a service station by a psycho and drugged. When she woke up she was in a coffin and was scraping the lid with her fingers to get out but she was trapped underground. And that was the end of the story.’
‘That’s gruesome!’
‘One of those movies I wish I’d never seen; it gave me nightmares for years.’
‘Well, the nightmare of these people was all too real. And I’ve no doubt they saw what was coming. They would have heard the huge explosion, then there would have been the downpours of hot rocks and pumice. Then darkness. It was an apocalypse. In just twenty-four hours this fertile valley turned into a desert. After that no one could live here for at least three hundred years.’ He strokes her forehead.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she says.
‘Try me.’
‘You’re thinking it’s a blueprint of what could happen again.’
‘Partly,’ he says teasingly. ‘I was also worrying about this fallen vulcanologist I have to look after,’ he laughs. ‘But yes, you’re right. I think everyone is in denial about the extent of the danger.
We are way outside the Red Zone here and so is the centre of Naples. Yet there is no escape plan.’
Frances sits up and looks around.
‘Are you feeling better?’
She yawns deeply, sucking in the air. ‘Yes. Dizzy spell gone.’
Marcello helps her to her feet.
A bluish hue envelops the mountain in the late afternoon. She hasn’t seen the volcano from this angle before and tries to envisage what the people who inhabited the Campanian plain four thousand years earlier had seen. The peak would have looked completely different; Vesuvius hadn’t yet formed. It was Mt Somma that overshadowed the villagers until it exploded and the younger volcano grew into its own. In the distance, olive groves carpet purple low-lying hills and the tiled roofs of tightly clustered villages dot the horizon. Smoke drifts skyward from a farm bonfire nearby but, save for a barking dog, there is no sign of life.
Marcello has wandered beyond the excavations and is bending down, looking closely at something. He raises his arm and calls her over. On the ground around Marcello, dozens of footprints are etched into the hard brown surface.
‘We’ve found thousands of these preserved in the volcanic ash.’ He traces one of them with a finger. ‘People from the buried villages.’
Frances pulls off one of her boots and a sock before stepping into one of the footprints. ‘I would have been a giant,’ she laughs as her foot overlaps the embedded print. ‘One-seventy-seven centimetres with size nine feet.’
‘An exotic blonde Amazon! You certainly would have stood out.’
Frances steps into one print after another, looking in the direction they were headed, towards the hills. ‘Maybe they got it right,’ she says. ‘Running away on foot may be the smartest thing to do if you consider the chaos on the roads.’
‘Only if you know which way to run—these people were running east, hoping to shelter in the forests,’ he says, pointing to the hills. ‘It was a path to death, straight into the fallout zone. They would have been caught in a pyroclastic flow and asphyxiated under piles of hot pumice.’
She bends down to touch the footprints, such a tangible and human link to a lost civilisation. Male or female? She couldn’t tell.
As Frances puts her boot back on, she tries to picture the panic as the eruption continued day and night, the giant plume rising above the volcano, far out of sight into the stratosphere.
A faint droning startles her. High above, a jetstream from an airliner paints two straight lines like shooting arrows across the sky. ‘Three times higher than that plane,’ she says. ‘It’s hard to believe, but that’s how high the eruption would have gone.’
He is walking away across the barren fields when he stops and turns to her. ‘That’s why I’m so certain we must understand the winds and where they will blow all the debris if there’s another eruption.’ He gestures wildly, his hands puncturing the air. ‘These poor primitives knew nothing.’ He points to the prints. ‘They didn’t have a chance, just like the people of Pompeii who rushed back to their homes after the first explosion and were incinerated. We have the luxury of the best scientific knowledge at our disposal, yet we will have to run just like these poor wretches. And we’ll have to run through another minefield as well, of politics and corruption.’
He turns back and she follows him to another stretch of hard ground, knotty weeds brushing her legs. More footprints mark the rock as clearly as feet pressing into a soft sandy beach. ‘These are heading in the opposite direction, north and northwest. If they kept running that way, these people might have escaped.’
Frances nodded. ‘You’re right. The burning column would have hovered in the stratosphere for hours, maybe a day or two. But when it collapsed into the pyroclastic flows, their survival would have depended on where they had chosen to flee.’
He looks grim. ‘And now we know the winds carried the surges right into Naples as well as the entire area to the northeast of Vesuvius, nearly twice as far as allowed for in the current evacuation plans.’
The plane has disappeared and its jetstream is already evaporating when the roar of a second jet breaks the silence.
Frances looks up. ‘No chance of escaping that way either. Aeroplanes can’t fly where there’s ash.’
‘How on earth can we get that message out? You’ve heard how everyone dismisses the threat, even my own grandfather. They think this all happened so long ago. Well, it might be a long time in human years, but it’s seconds in volcanic time.’
They walk to the top of a rise but there are no more footprints.
‘There’s another bigger excavation over there.’ Marcello points across a dusty landscape intersected here and there with rows of vines and vegetable patches and a smattering of farmhouses. ‘A much bigger prehistoric settlement. Would you like to see it?’
‘Sure, but this time I might just stay at the top and look down.’
They drive a few more kilometres then pull over where the road divides into three. Marcello accelerates over a kerb and into a rubbish-strewn wasteland. He looks puzzled and suddenly hits the brakes. Leaping out of the car he slams the door behind him and runs, stopping just ahead by a sea of orange plastic. ‘Those bastards!’
Frances has caught him up. His eyes burn black with anger. ‘This was one of Europe’s biggest and oldest Bronze Age archaeological sites. Now it is a garbage dump!’
He stamps around the periphery of a giant pit filled with thousands of rubbish bags. Pieces of broken fences litter the ground. He kicks a broken padlock lying in the dust then picks up a signboard and holds it up: ‘Preserved Bronze Age Village’.
‘What a fucking joke!’ He throws it down hard.
‘When did this happen?’
‘It must have been recently—we were here two or three weeks ago.’ He bends down to touch one of the orange bags. ‘They haven’t been here long.’
Frances sniffs. A chemical stench fills her nostrils. She steps back quickly. ‘Let’s get out of here. I think they’re poisonous!’
On the drive back to Naples, neither of them speaks. The rattling of the car is the only sound before Frances turns on the radio. A news bulletin reports more details of the street murders. Fabio Dragorra has been questioned by police but released after he supplied two alibis confirming he was nowhere near the scene of the crime the previous night.
A government minister is interviewed and pays tribute to the two campaigners who had been killed. He promises the inquiry into illegal waste disposal will continue and denied any suggestion that the rubbish situation was out of control.
‘Liars!’ Marcello splutters. ‘They’re all liars. That dumping back there—do you think they will do anything? Of course not. They’re all in it together—Il Sistema, the politicians. The terrible truth is that they care more about money than the health of their own children. They’re poisoning our land and they don’t care.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The weeks leading up to the mass street protest had been full of frustration for Frances, who was beginning to feel suffocated. Everyone she spoke to was distracted. She was getting the brush-off from the university and no one was showing interest in her research, especially the ever-busy Professor Corsi. Marcello and Riccardo had shifted their passion about the volcano to the garbage crisis, at least momentarily, and with less than a month to Christmas, all of Naples seemed hell-bent on preparing for a celebration and a holiday. No one wanted to hear bad news about a volcano.
The protest would be held in a few days’ time and as far as she was concerned, the sooner it was over the better and they could all get back to the job that had brought her here.
Thank heavens for Pasquale! She had welcomed an invitation to accompany him that night to a British diplomatic dinner at the Palazzo Capodimonte. Along with Satore, he had been selected to perform in the the conservatorium’s string quartet and was allowed to bring a guest. Ever since the shootings, Pasquale had struggled to sleep and she knew he was a nervous wreck, with his major audition just a
week away. A night out with a bit of glitz would do them both some good.
The invitation stated cocktail wear, but after sifting through her wardrobe, Frances realized there was little there except mountain-climbing gear, casual clothes and one sharp suit for the rare times she needed to shed the nerdy scientist image for something more corporate.
A quick jaunt along Via Toledo quickly changed that. Italian fashion was irresistible! The more bling, the better, more sequins and sparkles than she’d seen in her life. Even the new woollen sweaters were covered in glittery finishes. She had moved from one shop to another in search of a dress. Taller and broader than most Italian women, Frances found the dresses either too short or too tight.
In a small boutique in a lane off the main street, she found a rack of silk beaded dresses. They looked perfect. She’d slipped into one and the emerald green had perfectly complemented her eyes and fair complexion. She’d spun around, thinking no, too bright. She’d felt like a Christmas tree and didn’t want to be that conspicuous. She’d tried on a black one in the same style—much better. It was more discreet, the hem just above her knee, with a scooped neckline and, as the shop assistant assured her, the latest design from Milan. She’d checked the price tag. Ouch! Oh well, she’d felt like lashing out so handed over her credit card and made the dress her own.
Around six she is almost ready to go. Silky black stockings, a new pair of stilettos and a black pashmina set off the dress perfectly. For once, she takes the time to apply make-up and style her hair. Brushing her blonde tresses back she scoops them into a French roll, securing it with an elaborately patterned clip she’d bought from the Pakistani at the market. Just as she’s putting on a pair of delicate drop zircon earrings, Riccardo thumps through the door.
At first, he doesn’t notice her standing in front of a mirror on the far side of the room. He looks world weary as he tosses his bike helmet onto the sofa and lets out a huge sigh.
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