Attilius held a torch aloft in one hand and with the other he supported the admiral. Together they went out into the central courtyard. Pliny had stayed here often over the years. It was a favourite spot of his: the dappled light on the pink stone, the smell of the flowers, the cooing from the dovecote set in the wall above the veranda. But now the garden was in pitch darkness, trembling with the roar of falling stone. Pumice was strewn across the covered walkway and the clouds of dust from the dry and brittle rock set off his wheezing. He stopped outside the door of his usual room and waited for Attilius to clear a space so that he could pull it open. He wondered what had happened to the birds. Had they flown away just before the manifestation started, thus offering a portent, if an augur had been on hand to divine it? Or were they out there somewhere in the black night, battered and huddled? ‘Are you frightened, Marcus Attilius?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s good. To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.’ He rested his hand on the engineer’s shoulder as he kicked off his shoes. ‘Nature is a merciful deity,’ he said. ‘Her anger never lasts forever. The fire dies. The storm blows itself out. The flood recedes. And this will end as well. You’ll see. Get some rest.’
He shuffled into the windowless room leaving Attilius to close the door behind him.
The engineer stayed where he was, leaning against the wall, watching the rain of pumice. After a while he heard loud snores emanating from the bedroom. Extraordinary, he thought. Either the admiral was pretending to be asleep – which he doubted – or the old man really had nodded off. He glanced at the sky. Presumably Pliny was right, and the ‘manifestation’, as he still insisted on calling it, would begin to weaken. But that was not happening yet. If anything, the force of the storm was intensifying. He detected a different, harsher sound to the dropping rock, and the ground beneath his feet was trembling, as it had in Pompeii. He ventured out a cautious pace from beneath the canopy, holding his torch towards the ground, and immediately he was struck hard on his arm. He almost dropped the torch. He grabbed a lump of the freshly fallen rock. Pressing himself against the wall he examined it in the light.
It was greyer than the earlier pumice – denser, larger, as if several pieces had been welded together – and it was hitting the ground with greater force. The shower of frothy white rock had been unpleasant and frightening but not especially painful. To be struck by a piece of this would be enough to knock a man unconscious. How long had this been going on?
He carried it into the hall and gave it to Torquatus. ‘It’s getting worse,’ he said. ‘While we’ve been eating, the stones have been getting heavier.’ And then, to Pomponianus, ‘What sort of roofs do you have here, sir? Flat or pitched?’
‘Flat,’ said Pomponianus. ‘They form terraces. You know – for the views across the bay.’
Ah yes, thought Attilius – the famous views. Perhaps if they had spent a little less time gazing out to sea and rather more looking over their shoulders at the mountain behind them, they might have been better prepared. ‘And how old is the house?’
‘It’s been in my family for generations,’ said Pomponianus proudly. ‘Why?’
‘It isn’t safe. With that weight of rock falling on it – and on old timber, too – sooner or later the joists will give way. We need to go outside.’
Torquatus hefted the rock in his hand. ‘Outside? Into this?’
For a moment nobody spoke. Then Pomponianus started to wail that they were finished, that they should have sacrificed to Jupiter as he had suggested right at the beginning, but that nobody ever listened to him –
‘Shut up,’ said his wife. ‘We have cushions, don’t we? And pillows and sheets? We can protect ourselves from rocks.’
Torquatus said, ‘Where’s the admiral?’
‘Asleep.’
‘He’s resigned himself to death, hasn’t he? All that nonsense about wine! But I’m not ready to die, are you?’
‘No.’ Attilius was surprised by the firmness of his answer. After Sabina had died, he had gone on numbly, and if he had been told his existence was about to end, he would not have cared much one way or the other. He did not feel that way now.
‘Then let’s return to the beach.’
Livia was shouting to the slaves to fetch pillows and linen as Attilius hurried back into the courtyard. He could still hear Pliny’s snores. He banged on the door and tried to open it but even in the short time he had been away the path had filled again with debris. He had to kneel to clear it, then dragged open the door and ran in with his torch. He shook the admiral’s fleshy shoulder and the old man groaned and blinked in the light.
‘Let me be.’
He tried to roll back on his side. Attilius did not argue with him. He hooked his elbow under Pliny’s armpit and hauled him to his feet. Staggering under the weight he pushed the protesting admiral towards the door and they were barely across the threshold when he heard one of the ceiling beams crack behind them and part of the roof came crashing to the floor.
They put the pillows on their heads crossways, so that the ends covered their ears, and tied them in place with strips torn from the sheets, knotting them tightly under their chins. Their bulging white heads gave them the look of blind, subterranean insects. Then each collected a torch or a lamp and with one hand on the shoulder of the person in front – apart from Torquatus, who took the lead and who was wearing his helmet rather than a pillow – they set off to walk the gauntlet down to the beach.
All around them was a fury of noise – the heaving sea, the blizzard of rock, the boom of roofs giving way. Occasionally Attilius felt the muffled thump of a missile striking his skull and his ears rang as they had not done since he had been beaten by his teachers as a child. It was like being stoned by a mob – as if the deities had voted Vulcan a triumph and this painful procession, stripped of all human dignity, was how he chose to humiliate his captives. They edged forwards slowly, sinking up to their knees in the loose pumice, unable to move any faster than the admiral, whose coughing and wheezing seemed to worsen each time he stumbled forwards. He was holding on to Alexion and being held on to by Attilius; behind the engineer came Livia and, behind her, Pomponianus, with the slaves forming a line of torches at the back.
The force of the bombardment had cleared the road of refugees but down on the beach there was a light and it was towards this that Torquatus led them. A few of the citizens of Stabiae and some of the men of the Minerva had broken up one of the useless ships and set it on fire. With ropes, the heavy sail from the liburnian and a dozen oars they had built themselves a large shelter beside the blaze. People who had been fleeing along the coast had come down from the road, begging for protection, and a crowd of several hundred was jostling for cover. They did not want to let the repulsive-looking newcomers share their makeshift tent and there was some jeering and scuffling around the entrance until Torquatus shouted that he had Admiral Pliny with him and would crucify any marine who refused to obey his orders.
Grudgingly, room was made, and Alexion and Attilius lowered Pliny to the sand just inside the entrance. He asked weakly for some water and Alexion took a gourd from a slave and held it to his lips. He swallowed a little, coughed and lay down on his side. Alexion gently untied the pillow and placed it under his head. He glanced up at Attilius. The engineer shrugged. He did not know what to say. It seemed to him unlikely that the old man could survive much more of this.
He turned away and peered into the interior of the shelter. People were wedged together, barely able to move. The weight of the pumice was causing the roof to dip and from time to time a couple of the sailors cleared it by lifting it with the ends of their oars, tipping the stones away. Children were crying. One boy sobbed for his mother. Otherwise nobody spoke or shouted. Attilius tried to work out what time it was – he assumed it must be the middle of the night but then again it would be impossible to tell even if it was dawn – and he wondered how long they could endure. Sooner or later, hunger or thirst,
or the pressure of the pumice rising on either side of their tent, would force them to abandon the beach. And then what? Slow suffocation by rock? A death more drawn-out and ingenious than anything Man had ever devised in the arena? So much for Pliny’s belief that Nature was a merciful deity!
He tugged the pillow from his sweating head and it was as his face was uncovered that he heard someone croaking his name. In the crowded near-darkness he could not make out who it was at first, and even when the man thrust his way towards him he did not recognise him for he seemed to be made of stone, his face chalk-white with dust, his hair raised in spikes, like Medusa’s. Only when he spoke his name – ‘It’s me, Lucius Popidius’ – did he realise that it was one of the aediles of Pompeii.
Attilius seized his arm. ‘Corelia? Is she with you?’
‘My mother – she collapsed on the road.’ Popidius was weeping. ‘I couldn’t carry her any longer. I had to leave her.’
Attilius shook him. ‘Where’s Corelia?’
Popidius’s eyes were blank holes in the mask of his face. He looked like one of the ancestral effigies on the wall of his house. He swallowed hard.
‘You coward,’ said Attilius.
‘I tried to bring her,’ whined Popidius. ‘But that madman had locked her in her room.’
‘So you abandoned her?’
‘What else could I do? He wanted to imprison us all!’ He clutched at Attilius’s tunic. ‘Take me with you. That’s Pliny over there, isn’t it? You’ve got a ship? For pity’s sake – I can’t go on alone –’
Attilius pushed him away and stumbled towards the entrance of the tent. The bonfire had been crushed to extinction by the rain of rocks and now that it had gone out the darkness on the beach was not even the darkness of night but of a closed room. He strained his eyes towards Pompeii. Who was to say that the whole world was not in the process of being destroyed? That the very force which held the universe together – the logos, as the philosophers called it – was not disintegrating? He dropped to his knees and dug his hands into the sand and he knew at that moment, even as the grains squeezed through his fingers, that everything would be annihilated – himself, and Pliny, Corelia, the library at Herculaneum, the fleet, the cities around the bay, the aqueduct, Rome, Caesar, everything that had ever lived or ever been built: everything would eventually be reduced to a shoal of rock and an endlessly pounding sea. None of them would leave so much as a footprint behind them; they would not even leave a memory. He would die here on the beach with the rest and their bones would be crushed to powder.
But the mountain had not done with them yet. He heard a woman scream and raised his eyes. Faint and miraculous, far in the distance and yet growing in intensity, he saw a corona of fire in the sky.
VENUS
25 August
The final day of the eruption
Inclinatio
[00:12 hours]
‘There comes a point when so much magma is being erupted so quickly that the eruption column density becomes too great for stable convection to persist. When this condition prevails, column collapse takes place, generating pyroclastic flows and surges, which are far more lethal than tephra fall.’
Volcanoes: A Planetary Perspective
The light travelled slowly downwards from right to left. A sickle of luminous cloud – that was how Pliny described it – a sickle of luminous cloud sweeping down the western slope of Vesuvius leaving in its wake a patchwork of fires. Some were winking, isolated pinpricks – farmhouses and villas that had been set alight. But elsewhere whole swathes of the forest were blazing. Vivid, leaping sheets of red and orange flame tore jagged holes in the darkness. The scythe moved on, implacably, for at least as long as it would have taken to count to a hundred, flared briefly, and vanished.
‘The manifestation,’ dictated Pliny, ‘has moved into a different phase.’
To Attilius, there was something indefinably sinister about that silent, moving crest – its mysterious appearance, its enigmatic death. Born in the ruptured summit of the mountain it must have rolled away to drown itself in the sea. He remembered the fertile vineyards, the heavy clumps of grapes, the manacled slaves. There would be no vintage this year, ripe or otherwise.
‘It’s hard to tell from here,’ Torquatus said, ‘but judging by its position, I reckon that cloud of flame may just have passed over Herculaneum.’
‘And yet it doesn’t seem to be on fire,’ replied Attilius. ‘That part of the coast looks entirely dark. It’s as if the town has vanished –’
They looked towards the base of the burning mountain, searching for some point of light, but there was nothing.
The effect on the beach at Stabiae was to shift the balance of terror, first one way and then the other. They could soon smell the fires on the wind, a pungent, acrid taste of sulphur and cinders. Someone screamed that they would all be burned alive. People sobbed, none louder than Lucius Popidius, who was calling for his mother, and then someone else – it was one of the sailors who had been prodding the roof with his oar – exclaimed that the heavy linen was no longer sagging. That quietened the panic.
Attilius cautiously stretched out his arm beyond the shelter of the tent, his palm held upwards, as if checking for rain. The marine was right. The air was still full of small missiles but the storm was not as violent as before. It was as if the mountain had found a different outlet for its malevolent energy, in the rushing avalanche of fire rather than in the steady bombardment of rock. In that moment he made up his mind. Better to die doing something – better to fall beside the coastal highway and lie in some unmarked grave – than to cower beneath this flimsy shelter, filled with fearful imaginings, a spectator waiting for the end. He reached for his discarded pillow and planted it firmly on his head then felt around in the sand for the strip of sheet. Torquatus asked him quietly what he was doing.
‘Leaving.’
‘Leaving?’ Pliny, reclining on the sand, his notes spread around him and weighed down with piles of pumice, looked up sharply. ‘You’ll do no such thing. I absolutely refuse you permission to go.’
‘With the greatest respect, admiral, I take my orders from Rome, not from you.’ He was surprised some of the slaves had not also made a run for it. Why not? Habit, he supposed. Habit, and the lack of anywhere to run to.
‘But I need you here.’ There was a wheedling note in Pliny’s hoarse voice. ‘What if something should happen to me? Someone must make sure my observations are not lost to posterity.’
‘There are others who can do that, admiral. I prefer to take my chance on the road.’
‘But you’re a man of science, engineer. I can tell it. That’s why you came. You’re much more valuable to me here. Torquatus – stop him.’
The captain hesitated, then unfastened his chin-strap and took off his helmet. ‘Take this,’ he said. ‘Metal is better protection than feathers.’ Attilius started to protest but Torquatus thrust it into his hands. ‘Take it – and good luck.’
‘Thank you.’ Attilius grasped his hand. ‘May luck go with you, too.’
It fitted him well enough. He had never worn a helmet before. He stood and picked up a torch. He felt like a gladiator about to enter the arena.
‘But where will you go?’ protested Pliny.
Attilius stepped into the storm. The light stones pinged off the helmet. It was utterly dark apart from the few torches planted into the sand around the perimeter of the shelter and the distant, glowing pyre of Vesuvius.
‘Pompeii.’
Torquatus had estimated the distance between Stabiae and Pompeii at three miles – an hour’s walk along a good road on a fine day. But the mountain had changed the laws of time and space and for a long while Attilius seemed to make no progress at all.
He managed to get up off the beach and on to the road without too much difficulty and he was lucky that the view of Vesuvius was uninterrupted because the fires gave him an aiming-point. He knew that as long as he walked straight towards them he must come to Pompei
i eventually. But he was pushing into the wind, so that even though he kept his head hunched, shrinking his world to his pale legs and the little patch of stone in which he waded, the rain of pumice stung his face and clogged his mouth and nostrils with dust. With each step he sank up to his knees in pumice and the effect was like trying to climb a hill of gravel, or a barn full of grain – an endless, featureless slope which rubbed his skin and tore at the muscles at the top of his thighs. Every few hundred paces he swayed to a stop and somehow, holding the torch, he had to drag first one foot and then the other out of the clinging pumice and pick the stones out of his shoes.
The temptation to lie down and rest was overwhelming and yet it had to be resisted, he knew, because sometimes he stumbled into the bodies of those who had given up already. His torch showed soft forms, mere outlines of humanity, with occasionally a protruding foot, or a hand clawing at the air. And it was not only people who had died on the road. He blundered into a team of oxen that had become stuck in the drifts and a horse that had collapsed between the shafts of an abandoned wagon, its burden too heavy to pull: a stone horse pulling a stone cart. All these things appeared as brief apparitions in the flickering circle of light he carried. There must have been much more that mercifully he could not see. Sometimes the living as well as the dead emerged fleetingly out of the darkness – a man carrying a cat; a young woman, naked and deranged; another couple carrying a long brass candelabrum slung across their shoulders, the man at the front and the woman at the back. They were heading in the opposite direction to him. From either side came isolated, barely human cries and moans, such as he imagined might be heard on a battlefield after the fighting was done. He did not stop, apart from once, when he heard a child crying out for its parents. He stopped, listening, and stumbled around for a while, trying to find the source of the voice, calling out in response, but the child went quiet, perhaps out of fear at the sound of a stranger, and eventually he gave up the search.