_From Pompeii to Lake Avernus._
WE were at Naples and Pompeii in the winter, and again in the spring.
The Romans aver that most of the foreigners who die in their city with
fever, contract the disease in Naples. We credited this so far that we
preferred to make short visits to the latter place, and, while there,
passed much time in the open air. It is our conviction, moreover, that
little is to be apprehended from malaria in the worst-drained city of
Italy if visitors will stipulate invariably for bed-room and parlor
fires. The climate is deceitful, if not so desperately wicked as many
believe. Extremes of heat and cold are alike to be avoided, and the
endeavor to do this involves care and expense. It must be remembered
that in America we have no such winter suns as those that keep alive
the heart of the earth in Southern Europe. Nor are our houses stone
grottoes, constructed with express reference to the exclusion of
the fierce heats of eight months of the year. The natives affect to
despise fires in their houses except a charcoal-blast in the kitchen
while meals are cooking, and a brazier, or _scaldino_ of coals in the
_portière’s_ lodge, in very cold weather. Our Roman visitors evidently
regarded the undying wood-fire in our _salle_ as an extravagant
caprice. It was pretty, they admitted. It pleased their æsthetic
taste, and they never failed to praise it, in taking their seats as
far as possible from it. Indoor life to them is a matter of secondary
importance in comparison with driving, walking and visiting. The ladies
have few domestic duties, or such intellectual pursuits as would tempt
them to sit for hours together at home. Cookery, sewing and housework
are done by hirelings, who are plentiful, content with low wages and
who live upon salads, black bread and sour wine, never expecting even
savory crumbs left by their employers. Americans are apt to construe
literally the injunction to live in Rome as the Romans do, leaving out
of view the grave consideration that they are not, also, born and bred
Italians. They have cold feet incessantly, even at night, they will
tell you; are chilled to the marrow by stone walls and floors; the
linen sheets are so many snow-drifts; the air of their apartments is
that of ice-vaults upon their incoming from outdoor excursions.
“Yet, it is too absurd to have fires in this lovely weather! Who would
think of such a thing at home on a June day?”
Forgetting that “at home” the June air would make its way to the inner
chambers and modify the temperature of the very cellars. One more
sanitary hint, and I leave practical suggestions for the present. Wear
thick flannels and woolen stockings in the Italian winter, and keep
at hand light shawls or sacques that may be cast about the shoulders
indoors, in laying aside the wrappings you have worn in the street.
Always recollect that the danger of taking cold is greatest in coming
in, not in going out.
The winter weather in Naples was so fine as to banish our fears of
illness. We had heard that sea-storms a week long were not uncommon at
that season, and to make sure of Pompeii, drove out thither, the day
after our arrival. The entrance to the long-entombed city provoked and
amused us. The Hôtel Dioméde is to the eye a second-class lager-bier
saloon, the name conspicuous above the entrance. A smart and dirty
waiter ran down the steps, opened the carriage-door, and ushered us
into the restaurant, where the proprietor received us bowingly, and
pressed upon us the hospitalities of the establishment.
Crest-fallen at the news that we had lunched, he opined,
notwithstanding, that we would purchase something in the Museum, and
passed us on to the custodian of the inner room. This was stocked with
trinkets, vases, manufactured antiquities, etc., prepared to meet the
wants of those travellers to whom a cheap imitation is better than a
costly original; people who wear lava brooches and bracelets, crowd
their mantels with mock Parian images and talk of “_Eye_talians” and
“Pompey-_eye_.” We were not to be stayed, having seen the turf and sky
beyond the back-door.
A flight of steps took us up to a high terrace where was the
ticket-office. A revolving bar passed us through between two guards. A
guide in the same uniform was introduced to us.
“No. 27 will show you whatever you wish to see,” said an officer.
No. 27 touched his cap, and belonged to us henceforth.
No ashes, or scoria heaps yet! No ruins,—no lava! For all we could
perceive—no Pompeii. Only a pleasant walk between high turfed banks and
portulacca-beds, with Vesuvius, still and majestic, a mile or two away,
a plume of white vapor curling slowly above the cone. We traversed a
short, covered corridor, and began the ascent of a paved alley—dead
walls on each side.
“_Porta della Marina!_ _Via della Marina!_” said our guide, then,
translating into French the information that we had entered Pompeii by
the Gate and the Street of the Sea—the highway of city-traffic before
the imprisoned demons of the mountain broke bounds.
The streets are all alleys, like this first, laid with heavy polygonal
blocks of tufa, and grooved—most deeply and sharply at the corners—by
wheels. The ruts of Glaucus’ chariot-wheels! But what were the
dimensions of the bronze vehicle “of the most fastidious and graceful
fashion,” drawn by _two_ horses of Parthian breed that “glided rapidly”
by others of the same build between these blocks of buildings? Or was
there a Pompeian law requiring those who went in a certain direction to
proceed by specified streets?
We were not prepared for the difficulty of ascertaining which was the
West End of the town which Glaucus tells Clodius, “had the brilliancy
of luxury without the lassitude of its pomp.” Nearly every house has
a shop attached to it. “Stalls” we would style them, in which the
brick counter, formerly covered with marble, takes up at least half
the room. The shops were closed at night by wooden doors or shutters
filling up the entire width of the front. These, having decayed or
burned away, the visitor steps from the street into the cell walled
in on three sides, and roofless. The entrance to the dwelling had no
connection whatever with the stall built on to it. If this was the
proprietor’s abode, he, in genuine Epicurean fashion, “sank the shop”
out of work-hours. It is supposed that the wealthier citizens rented
their street-fronts at a high rate, to tradespeople, without the
consequent depreciation of gentility that would befall a member of New
York uppertendom, were he to “live over” or back of a “store.” Another
surprise was the band-box tenements in which people who made more
account of ease and beauty than of their own immortality, contrived to
live. The vestibule, running beside the shop-wall from the street into
the Lilliputian mansion, is scarcely five feet wide in some of the best
houses. The court-yard behind is not larger than a square table-cloth;
the fountain-basin in the middle resembles a big punch-bowl. Beyond
this, separated now by a marble or paved walk, formerly, also, by a
curtain that could be raised or lowered, is a larger court. This part
of the building was devoted to such public dealings as the owner might
have with the outer world. Here he received office-seekers, beggars
and book-agents; paid bills and gave orders. The family court—the
_peristylium_—was still further back, and usually raised by the height
of a marble step above the second. This was enclosed by pillars,
painted red, a quarter of the way up,—the rest white. Another curtain
shut in this sanctum from the general gaze. In the middle of the court
was a flower-bed, its centre a fountain. About these three courts were
built dining-room, kitchen, dressing- and bed-rooms and other family
apartments. The upper stories were of wood and usually occupied as
servants’ dormitories. These have slowly mouldered away, having been,
some think, calcined by the hot ashes. There are, of course, variations
upon this plan, and some mansions of respectable size without the
commercial attachment, but the above may serve as an outline draught of
the typical Pompeian dwelling, even of the richer classes.
“Have you read the ‘Last Days of Pompeii?’” the guide amazed us by
saying when we had wandered in his wake for an hour.
We had a copy with us and showed it to him. He believed it to be an
Italian work, it presently appeared, having read it in that language,
_sans_ preface, we suppose, for he also accepted it as sober, veracious
history. We allowed ourselves to share his delusion in beholding the
plot of ground—a sheet would have covered it—in which Nydia tended
the flowers of Glaucus; the shrine of the Penates at the back of the
peristyle; the _triclinum_—or banqueting-room in which the young Greek
supped with Lepidus, Pansa, Sallust, Clodius and his _umbra_; where
the slave-carver “performed that office upon the Ambracian kid to the
sound of music, his knife keeping time, beginning with a low tenor, and
accomplishing the arduous feat amidst a magnificent diapason.”
The apartment is, like the others, small but well-proportioned, and
the frescoes are still quite distinct. We allotted places to the host
and his several guests about an imaginary table, the guide smiling at
our animated interest without a misgiving that the _dramatis personæ_
were dream-children of Signore Bulwer’s brain. I dare not attempt his
Italianization of the noble author’s title. Workmen were repairing the
step by which we left the inner court for the _tablium_, or master’s
office. An accident had shivered the marble sheathing and several
bits were cast aside as worthless. With the guide’s sanction, I
pocketed them, and afterward had them made into dainty little salvers,
purely clear as the finest Parian, or the enamored Glaucus’ ideal of
Ione—“that nymph-like beauty which for months had shone down upon the
waters of his memory.”
The silence that has its home in the deserted city is something to
dream of,—not describe. The town is swept and clean—doubtless cleaner
than when the gargoyles on the fountains at every other corner gushed
with fresh winter. That the Pompeians were a thirsty race, water- as
well as wine-bibbers,—is distinctly proved by the hollows worn in the
stone sides of these enclosed hydrants, just where a man would rest his
hand and lean his whole weight to swing his body around in order to
bring his lips in contact with the stream from the carved spout. No.
27 showed us how it was done and by the simple action made stillness
and solitude more profound. Thousands of swarthy hands—the callous
palms of laborer and peasant,—must have rested thus for hundreds of
years to produce such abrasion of the solid stone. And here were he
and five pale-faced strangers,—the only living things in sight in a
street of yawning shop-fronts, built in compact blocks; to the right
a grove of columns and expanse of tessellated flooring—the Temple of
Justice, to which none now resorted, to which none would ever come
again for redress or penalty, while Time endures. Wherever the eye
fell were temples of deities whose names live only in mythology and in
song, the shrines and fanes of a dead Religion. This was the strangest
sight of all;—in this professedly Christian land, temples and altars
with the traces of slain and bloodless sacrifices that had smoked
upon them, to Mercury and Jupiter and Venus. There was the temple of
Isis—whose statue we saw, subsequently, in the Neapolitan Museum,—with
the chamber where the priests held their foul orgies, and the secret
passage by which they reached the speaking-tube concealed in the body
of the goddess; and the room in which Calenus and Burbo were found.
An earthquake may have overthrown upper chambers and toppled down
images but yesterday. Yet it is a city in which there is not the sign
of a cross, or other token that Christ was born and died; whose last
inhabitants and worshippers ate, drank, married and were given in
marriage in the name of Juno, while He walked the earth.
I have said that Pompeii is a band-box edition that looks like a
caricature of a town in which men once lived and traded and reveled.
The bed-rooms in the houses of Glaucus, Sallust, Pansa and even
in Diomed’s Villa, are no larger than the wardrobe closet of a
Philadelphia mechanic’s wife. A brick projection fills up one side. On
this the bed was laid. In some there are no windows; in others were
slits to admit air, but through which, owing to the thickness of the
walls and the contiguity of other buildings, little light could have
entered. The positive assertion of guide-books that window-glass was
unknown to the Pompeians is contradicted by the recent excavation of
a house in which a fragment of a pane still adheres to one of these
apertures. We saw it and can testify that it was a bit of indubitable
glass, set firmly in its casing. How Julia and Ione contrived to
light their dressing-rooms sufficiently to make such toilettes as
we see in ancient paintings, baffles our invention when we look at
the glimmering loop-holes and the tiny lamps that held but a few
thimblefuls of perfumed oil. Bulwer calls the _cubicula_ and boudoirs
“petty pigeon-holes,” but alleges that these darkened chambers were
“the effect of the most elaborate study”—that “they sought coolness
and shade.” We are dubious, in reading further of the fair Julia’s
toilette-appointments, that her “eye, accustomed to a certain darkness,
was sufficiently acute to perceive exactly what colors were the most
becoming—what shade of the delicate rouge gave the brightest beam to
her dark glance,” etc. In one house of the better—i. e.—larger sort—is
a really cozy boudoir, almost big enough to accommodate two people, a
dressing-table and a chair. The floor is in mosaic, wrought, as was
the Pompeian fashion, of bits of marble, black and white, less than
half-an-inch square, set with cement. The central design is a pretty
conceit of three doves, rifling a jewel-casket of ropes of pearls. This
work, like the image of the bear in the house to which it has given its
name, is covered with coarse sand to protect it from the weather. “The
fierce dog painted”—in mosaic—“on the threshold” of Glaucus’ house, has
been removed, with the immense “Battle of Darius and Alexander,” to the
Naples museum.
The variety and affluence of decoration in these dollhouses is
bewildering to the Occidental of this century. Every inch of wall and
floor was crowded with pictures in fresco and mosaic; statues in bronze
and marble adorned recess and court, and if the pearl-ropes perished
with her who wore them, there are enough cameos and intaglios of rarest
design and cutting; chains, bracelets, tiaras, finger and earrings and
necklaces, in the Neapolitan Museum, to indicate what were the other
riches of the despoiled casket.
I wish I could talk for awhile about this Museum, so unlike any other
in the world. Of its statuary, vases and paintings; of the furniture,
so odd and yet so beautiful, taken from the unroofed dwellings; of the
contents of baker’s, grocer’s, fruiterer’s, artist’s, jeweller’s and
druggist’s shops; of the variety of household implements that were
familiar to us through others of like pattern upon the shelves of our
own pantries and kitchens. Of patty-pans, fluted cake-moulds with
funnels in the middle; of sugar-tongs; ice-pitchers and coffee-urns;
of chafing-dishes, colanders and tea-strainers; sugar-scoops and
flour-sifters. Of just such oval “gem”-pans, fastened together by the
dozen, as I had pleased myself by buying the year before—as “quite a
new idea.” When I finally came upon a sheet-iron vessel, identical
in size and form with those that await the scavenger upon Fifth
Avenue sidewalks; beheld the dent made by the kick of the Pompeian
street-boy, the rim scorched by red-hot ashes “heaved” into it by
the scullion whose untidiness and irresponsibility foreshadowed the
nineteenth-century “help”—I sank upon the edge of a dismantled couch
that may have belonged to the Widow Fulvia, profound respect for the
wisdom of the Preacher filling my soul and welling up to my tongue!
“Is there anything of which it may be said, ‘See! this is new?’ It hath
been already of old time which was before us.”
I did not see clothes-wringer, vertical broiler, or Dover egg-beater,
but I make no doubt they were there, tucked away in corners I had
not time and strength to explore, behind a sewing-machine and
telephone-apparatus.
We have not—as yet—reproduced in America the so-termed nearly extinct
volcano of Solfatara. It is near the road from Naples to Baiæ.
I am tempted to lay down my pen in sheer discouragement at the thought
of what we saw in that drive of twelve hours, and how little space I
ought, in consistency with the plan of this work, to devote to it. Baia
was the Newport of Neapolis and other cities of Southern Italy, under
the consuls and emperors. Many rich Romans had summer-seats there, and
it had, likewise, a national reputation as the abode of philosophers
and authors.
“I grant the charms of Baiæ,” Bulwer puts into Glaucus’ mouth. “But I
love not the pedants who resort there, and who seem to weigh out their
pleasures by the drachm.”
The route thither lies through, or above the grotto of Posilipo, a
tunnel built, some assert, by order of Nero—the only commendable deed
recorded of him. On the principle, “To him that hath shall be given,”
others choose to ascribe the work to Augustus. It is certain that the
grotto existed in Nero’s time, as his contemporaries mention its gloom
and straitness. The tomb of Virgil is hidden among the vineyards on the
hill to the left as one leaves the tunnel, going from Naples. The tomb
beside which Petrarch planted a laurel! One of its remote successors
still flourishes—somewhat—at the door of the structure which belongs
to the class of Columbaria. A good-sized chamber has three windows
and a concave ceiling. Around the walls are pigeon-holes for cinerary
urns. There was a larger cavity between this room and a rear wall,
in which tradition insists Virgil was interred in compliance with his
often-expressed desire. Antiquarians and historians have squabbled over
the spot until plain people, with straightforward ways of thought,
question if Virgil ever lived at Posilipo, or elsewhere than in the
imagination of his countrymen. It is recorded that an urn, sealing up
his ashes, was here about the middle of the fourteenth century, and
that, running around the lip, was the epitaph known to every classic
smatterer, beginning—
“_Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere._”
Neither urn nor epitaph remains. A later inscription commences, “Qui
cineres?” Most visitors “give it up.” But Petrarch was here once, and
King Robert of Sicily, who helped Laura’s lover plant the laurel. And
Virgil—or his ashes—may have been. We generally gave the departed the
benefit of the doubt in such circumstances.
A mile aside from the Baiæ road is the Grotto del Cane, distinguished
for dogs and mephitic vapors, which, as Henry Bergh’s country-people,
we declined to enter.
Pozzuoli—Puteoli, when Paul landed there, after his shipwreck—is a
dirty, sleepy little town, in general complexion so dingy, and in
expression so down-hearted, the visitor is inclined to suspect that
its self-disgust had something to do with the gradual sinking of its
foundations for the last three hundred years. The steps by which St.
Paul gained the pier are dimly visible under the waters lapping lazily
above them. Nothing seems alive but the breeze, fragrant of sea-brine,
and shaking the blue surface of the bay into wavering lines and bars of
shaded green, purple, and silver, that were worth seeing if Puteoli was
not.
We alighted at the Temple of Serapis, _restored_ by Marcus Aurelius
and Septimus Severus. The site has shared the fate of Pozzuoli, having
been lowered by a succession of volcanic shocks a dozen feet below its
former level. The Egyptian deity was magnificently enthroned before the
decline of paganism, and this sea-side country, upon a pedestal in a
circular temple, enclosed by a portico of Corinthian columns—African
marble—sixteen in number. The pillars have been removed to the royal
palace at Caserta, and the salt ooze lies, sullen and green, over their
bases. The quadrangle of the temple had once its guard of forty-eight
granite columns, and a porch supported by six of marble, three of
which are left standing. It is a mournful ruin, the water lying deep
in the sunken centre and in pools over the highest part of the uneven
pavement, and is not made cheerful by the incongruous addition of
bath-houses on one side. Salt springs, some of them hot, broke through
the crust at the latest eruption—that which threw up Monte Nuovo in
1538.
Cicero had a villa on this coast—the “Puteolaneum,” beloved only less
than Tusculaneum. It was built upon rising ground, now occupied by a
vineyard and orchard, but commanding a beautiful view of sea and shore.
Here, Hadrian was buried after his decease at Baiæ, A.D. 138, and
rested until the construction of his Roman mausoleum.
Passing the amphitheatre of Pozzuoli, crumbled down to the seats, in
the arena of which Nero fought in person, and Diocletian fed wild
beasts with Christian martyrs by the hundred; by the chapel that
commemorates the death of Januarius, the patron saint of Naples, we
were in a steep road full of rough stones—a country lane where horses
could hardly hold their footing. Here Ernesto, the useful, who was,
at once, coachman and guide, informed us regretfully, that we must
walk to the gate of Solfatara. Moreover, with augmented regret—that,
although he had, up to this point, been able to protect us from the
sallies of other _ciceroni_, at, at least, five places where Baedeker
parenthesizes—(“Guide—1 franc for each pers.”)—he dared not push
righteous audacity too far. The tempers of the Solfatara men were
uncertain and hot, like their volcano—(nearly extinct).
“I veel stay ’ere veez de ’orses!” subjoined Ernesto, who means to go
to America in eight or ten years’ time, to seek a coachman’s place, and
practises English diligently to that end. “You veel meet at de gate von
man, verra ceevil, who veel zhow you all!”
The civil man awaited us at the top of the short, sharp climb; undid
the gate of the enclosure, and called our attention to the stucco
manufactory on the inside of the high fence. In his esteem, it
outranked the subterranean works whose bellowing and puffing filled
our ears. The earth used for this stucco is a pink pumice or clay,
pleasing to the eye and very plastic. The plain is composed entirely of
it. Men were digging and donkey-carts transporting it to a long shed
by the gate, where a huge wheel ground it into paste. Tumuli of the
same, natural and artificial, were scattered over the area, which is
an oblong basin among chalky hills. At brief intervals, smoke ascended
slowly from cracks in the arid earth which was hot to the touch. A man
stood near the volcano (nearly extinct) ready to hurl a big stone upon
the ground and awaken hollow echoes that rumbled away until lost in the
sea on one hand, among the volcanic hills on the other.
If Solfatara were in her usual mood that day, her reputed half-death is
an alarmingly energetic condition. Bunyan saw the place in his dreams
twice:
“About the midst of the valley, I perceived the mouth of hell to be.
Ever and anon the flame and smoke would come out in abundance, with
sparks and hideous noises. The flames would be reaching towards him;
also, he heard doleful noises and rushings to and fro.”
Again: “There was a door in the side of a hill. Within, it was very
dark and smoky. They also thought that they heard there a rumbling
noise as of fire, and a cry as of some tormented, and that they smelt
the scent of brimstone. The shepherds told them—‘This is a by-way to
hell.’”
So said our very civil man.
“What makes the noise down there?” I asked, loudly, to be heard above
the roaring and groaning.
“The fire, Madame!”
“But who keeps up the fires?”
“The devil, Madame, without question. That is his home.”
We listened. The sound, when we were somewhat used to it, had a
diabolical rhythm, as of the rise and fall of a thousand pistons,
propelled by a head of steam that, without this safety-valve, would
rend the solid globe asunder. It was angry, threatening, fiendish. The
deep crevice was faced with bright crystals of sulphur that glowed like
gems between the bursts of smoke. A man broke off some with a long
pole, and dragged them out to cool until we could handle them. The
ground is saturated with sulphurous gases, and the lips of the numerous
fissures encrusted with sulphites and alum. The idea of the conscious
malignity of the volcano was sustained by the warning of two of the men
standing near to a gentleman who had lighted a cigar.
“No! no! the signore must not bring that here. _She_ will not allow it.
_Ecco!_” as a volume of stifling vapor gushed out in our direction. “It
comes to you, you see!”
“Government monopoly! No interference tolerated,” said Caput, as the
offender retreated.
“It is always so! She does not like cigars, nor so much as a match,”
was all the solution we could get from the men of the phenomenon. “She
will smoke. Nobody else must.”
Fifty yards to the right of the nearly extinct crater is a fountain
of hot mud in a little hollow. An ugly, restless thing, that shivers
and heaves continually, and, every few moments, spouts like a whale,
or an uneasy villain whose conscience periodically betrays him into a
visible casting up of mire and dirt. The mud is a greasy black compound
of unpleasant ingredients, beginning with brimstone, and, to test the
heat, our civil man offered to boil eggs in it.
“Suppose one were to fall in?” queried I, eying the chaldron in
expectation of the next upward rush.
“Ah, Madame! he would be boiled also. Unless he should go too soon, all
the way _down_,” pointing ominously.
The horrible stuff trembled, surged in the middle as if a goblin-head
were rising—bubbled, and sank with a groan. The imp would try it again
presently, perhaps emerge to sight. I continued to gaze.
“Madame!” said a deprecating voice.
My friends had moved away. The guide, in the act of following, had
glanced back, and, seeing me motionless beside the mammoth egg-boiler,
recalling my question, descried suicidal intent in my eye and mien, and
rushed back to avert a _contretemps_ that might hurt his reputation as
a safe conductor and civil man.
“The friends of Madame await her,” he said, insinuatingly. “Nor is
it good for the lungs of Madame to inhale the gas from the pool,”
affecting to cough. “The pool is not handsome. In effect, it is a devil
of a place! Will not Madame have the goodness to walk on? There are
other things to see, very interesting!”
I laughed, frightening him still more, I fear, for he kept near me all
the time we were in the grounds, and whispered significantly to the
gate-keeper as I passed out. Hawthorne doubts if his Zenobia would
have drowned herself had she foreseen how disfigured a thing would be
dragged up by the grappling-hook. Similar knowledge of feminine nature
would have corrected our civil man’s suspicion of me. _Felo de se_ in
a boiling mud-hole would not tempt the maddest maniac who had, ever in
her life, cared to look in her mirror.
Monte Nuovo is a really dead, if not gone, volcano, a mile and a half
to the west of Pozzuoli. It came up in a night in 1538—a conical hill
of considerable height—a conglomerate of lava, trachyte, pumice and
ashes, now covered with shrubs and trees. The earthquake that created
it, lowered the coast and cut off Lake Lacrinus from the sea. In
mythological days, Hercules built a breakwater here that he might drive
the bulls of Geryon from the neighboring marshes. This sank at the
Monte Nuovo rising, but can be seen when the water is calm, together
with ruined piers and masses of masonry. A road branches off here from
the Baiæ thoroughfare to Lake Avernus.
Leaving the carriage on the shore of the latter, we went on foot to
the Grotto of the Sibyl. It is a dark, damp opening in the hill on
the south side of the lake. Rank vines festoon and evergreen thickets
overshadow the mouth. Five or six fellows, with unshorn hair and
beards, and in sheepskin coats and hats, clamored for permission to
pilot us through the long passage—the fabled entrance of hell—into the
central hall which lies midway between Lakes Avernus and Lacrinus.
“Should not be attempted by ladies!” cried Miss M—— from her open
Baedeker.
One and all, we raised remonstrative voices against the resolution of
our escort to penetrate the recess. Not see it when Homer had sung of
it and Virgil depicted the descent of Æneas by this very route to the
infernal regions! This was the protest as vehement as our entreaties.
One might draw inferences the reverse of complimentary to himself from
our alarm. Of what should he be afraid?
Had he heard how our friend, Mr. H——, after being carried in the
guide’s arms through the shallow pool covering the grotto-floor, had
been set down on the other side and forced to pay ten francs before the
wretch would bring him back?
Yes! he had had the tale from the victim’s lips.
“And should I not appear within the hour, send Ernesto in to see what
has become of me. Two honest men are a match for six such cutthroats
as these. I must own, candidly, that I never beheld worse countenances
and toilettes. If they won’t bring me back, I can wade through twelve
inches of water. Now, my fine fellows—are you ready?”
They had lighted their candles, strapped their breeches above their
knees and looked like utterly disreputable butchers, prepared for the
shambles.
We were ill-at-ease about the adventure, but, dissembling this for the
sake of appearances, before the brace of desperadoes who had remained
outside,—it would seem to watch us—strolled to the edge of the water
and sat down in the shade. The lake is a cup, two hundred feet in
depth, less than two miles in circumference, with a rich setting of
wooded hills. It was joined to Lacrinus in the reign of Augustus by
canals, and Roman fleets lay here in a sheltered harbor, Monte Nuovo
cut off this communication, traces of which can be seen in both lakes.
At the upper end of Avernus are the fine ruins of a Temple of Apollo.
We knew the ancient stories of noxious exhalations that killed birds
while flying over it, and of other manifest horrors of the location;
of gullies, infested by Cimmerian shades; of the Styx, draining its
slow waters in their sevenfold circuit of hell, by an underground
current from the bottom of this reservoir; of the ghostly boatman, the
splash of whose oars could be heard in the breathless solitude of these
accursed shores. Upon the hillsides, in the noisome depths of forests
polluted by the effluvia of the waters, smoked sacrifices to Hecate.
We saw a placid sheet, mirroring the skies as purely as do Como and
Windermere. The ravines were cloaked by chestnuts and laurels, and the
hills upon the thither side were clothed with vineyards. A lonely place
it is, with a brooding hush upon it that was not wholly imaginary. It
is assuredly not unlovely, nor in the slightest degree forbidding. The
only uncanny object we found was a vine at the entrance of the grotto.
It had a twisting, tough stem, and leaves in shape somewhat resembling
the ivy, although larger and more succulent, each marked in white
with the distinct impression of a serpent. Upon no two was the image
exactly the same in form or position, but the snake was there in all,
partly coiled, partly trailing over the dark-green surface, clearly
visible even to the scales, the head and, in some, the forked tongue.
We remembered the pampered viper of the witch of Vesuvius, and wondered
if the Sibylline spell had perpetuated in the leaving of this vine, the
image of a favorite familiar, or cursed a hated plant with this brand.
We gathered and pressed a handful of the mystic leaves from which the
sinuous lines faded with the verdure into a dull brown, after some
weeks.
The pair of cutthroats, removed to a barely respectful distance,
whispered together as we examined our floral gains, staring at us
from under black eyebrows. Traditions, known to the peasants, may have
divulged the secret of the odd veining. More likely—our neighbors were
objurgating Victor Emmanuel and his obedient soldiery for spoiling the
honest trade of brigandage, and reminding one another how their honored
ancestors would have fleeced these bold _forestieri_. Brigandage was
a hereditary possession in those fair old times; held in high esteem
by those who lived thereby, and, it was murmured, so gently rebuked by
the Government that it throve, not withered under the paternal frown.
It was openly asserted and generally believed that Cardinal Antonelli
came of such thievish and murderous stock, although he died the richest
man—save one—in Rome. The declension in Government morals on this head
may have had much to do with Caput’s triumphant egress from the cave
before the expiration of half the period he had named.
He reported the interior to consist of two narrow passages, ventilated
from above, and two chambers hewn in the rock. Through the larger
of these lay the entrance to the lower regions. No trace remains of
the route. Probably it was closed by earthquakes as useless, so many
other avenues to the same locality having been discovered. The smaller
room—the Sibyl’s Bath—is floored with mosaic and flooded to the depth
of a foot with tepid water, welling up in an adjacent nook. The walls
are smoke-blackened, the air is close, the ante-chamber to Hades less
imposing and more comfortless than when Ulysses passed this way, and
Dido’s perfidious lover was led by the Sibyl through corridor and hall
to the shadier realms underneath.
We stopped at a public house upon the Lucrine Lake, for lunch, and were
served with Falernian wine of really excellent flavor, and small yellow
oysters, tasting so strongly of copper as to be uneatable by us. People
get to liking them after many attempts, we were informed by Roman
epicures. One American gourmand, who had lived ten years in Italy, was
so far denaturalized as to protest that our “natives” are gross in size
and texture, and flavorless, when compared with these bilious-looking
bivalves.
“Baedeker says they were celebrated in ancient times,” remarked Miss
M——.
Glaucus regretted that he could not give his guests the oysters he
“had hoped to procure from Britain,” yet subjoins that “they want the
richness”—(the copperiness)—“of the Brundusium oyster.”
Old Baiæ is a heap of confusion and desolation that cumbers the hill
overlooking the modern town. The only ruins at all suggestive of the
state and luxury which were the boast of patrician Rome when Augustus
reigned and Horace wrote, are the foundations and part of the walls of
the Temples of Mercury and Diana. The former is around building with a
domed roof open-eyed at the top, like the Pantheon. Six horrible hags,
their parchment dewlaps dangling odiously, their black eyes glittering
with hunger and cunning, in rags like tattered bed-quilts, here insist
upon dancing the tarantella for the amusement of _forestieri_. They are
always in the temple. They have, presumably, no other abode. In other
doomed pleasant palaces than those of Babylon, the imagination takes up
Isaiah’s lament:—
“Their houses shall be full of doleful creatures, and _the daughters of
the owl shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there_!”
The Villa Bauli used to stand near Baiæ. Here, Nero plotted his
mother’s murder. Another ruined pile was the villa in which he
consented, with a feint of reluctance that did not impose upon his
accomplice, to the proposition of Anicetus to drown her by the sinking
of her galley. Julius Cæsar had a summer residence upon the neighboring
heights.
Ernesto brought us back to Naples over the hill of Posilipo, instead
of through the tunnel, gaining the summit when the glory of the
sunsetting was at fullest tide. Such light and such splendor as were
never before—or since—for us upon land or sea. To attempt description
in human speech would be, in me, presumption so rank as to verge upon
profanation. But when I would renew—in such faint measure as memory
and fancy can revive past ecstasy—the scene and emotion that made that
evening a joy for ever, I recite to myself words evoked by the view
from a true poet-soul and—
“With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Under the walls of Paradise.”