You have read, no doubt, of their discovering, a
year or two since, in making an excavation in a Pompeian street, the molds of
four human bodies, three women and a man, who fell down, blind and writhing, in
the storm of fire eighteen hundred years ago; whose shape the settling and
hardening ashes took; whose flesh wasted away, and whose bones lay there in the
hollow of the matrix till the cunning of this time found them, and, pouring
liquid plaster round the skeletons, clothed them with human form again, and drew
them forth into the world once more. There are many things in Pompeii which
bring back the gay life of the city, but nothing which so vividly reports the
terrible manner of her death as these effigies of the creatures that actually
shared it. The man in the last struggle has thrown himself upon his back and
taken his doom sturdily--there is a sublime calm in his rigid figure. The women
lie upon their faces, their limbs tossed and distorted, their drapery tangled
and heaped about them, and in every fiber you see how hard they died. One
presses her face into her handkerchief to draw one last breath unmixed with
scalding steam; another's arms are wildly thrown abroad to clutch at help;
another's hand is appealingly raised, and on her slight fingers you see the
silver hoops with which her poor dead vanity adorned them.
The guide takes you aside from the street into
the house where they lie, and a dreadful shadow drops upon your heart as you
enter their presence. Without, the hell-storm seems to fall again, and the whole
sunny plain to be darkened with its ruin, and the city to send up the tumult of
her despair.
What is there left in Pompeii to speak of after
this? The long street of tombs outside the walls? Those that died before the
city's burial seem to have scarcely a claim to the solemnity of death.
Shall we go see Diomed's Villa, and walk through
the freedman's long underground vaults, where his friends thought to be safe,
and were smothered in heaps? The garden-ground grows wild among its broken
columns with weeds and poplar saplings; in one of the corridors they sell
photographs, on which, if you please, Ventisei has his bottle, or drink-money.
So we escape from the doom of the calamity, and so, at last, the severely
forbidden "buonamano" (that is, a tip) is paid. A dog may die many
deaths besides choking with butter.
We return slowly through the city, where we have
spent the whole day, from nine till four o'clock. We linger on the way,
imploring Ventisei if there is not something to be seen in this or that house;
we make our weariness an excuse for sitting down, and cannot rend ourselves from
the bliss of being in Pompeii.
At last we leave its gates, and swear each other
to come again many times while in Naples, and never go again.
Perhaps it was as well. You cannot repeat great
happiness.
