[Illustration: Restored View of Pompeii.]
⁂ The volume on ‘Pompeii,’ lately published in the Library of
Entertaining Knowledge, contains every authentic detail of the
destruction of that city by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, A.D. 79;
and the second volume, which will be shortly published, will
complete the description of the remains of public and private
buildings, and of articles of domestic use, which have been
discovered in the ruins. The following observations on this
interesting subject are from an intelligent correspondent, who has
had the advantage of visiting the spot.
It is certainly surprising, that this most interesting city should have
remained undiscovered until so late a period, and that antiquaries and
learned men should have so long and materially erred about its
situation. In many places masses of ruins, portions of the buried
theatres, temples, and houses were not two feet below the surface of the
soil; the country people were continually digging up pieces of worked
marble, and other antique objects; in several spots they had even laid
open the outer walls of the town; and yet men did not find out _what it
was_, that peculiar, isolated mound of cinders and ashes, earth and
pumice-stone, covered. There is another circumstance which increases the
wonder of Pompeii remaining so long concealed. A subterranean canal, cut
from the river Sarno, traverses the city, and is seen darkly and
silently gliding on under the temple of Isis. This is said to have been
cut towards the middle of the fifteenth century, to supply the
contiguous town of the Torre dell’ Annunziata with fresh water; it
probably ran anciently in the same channel. But, cutting it, or clearing
it, workmen must have crossed under Pompeii from one side to the other.
As you walk round the walls of the city, and see how the volcanic matter
is piled upon it in one heap, it looks as though the hand of man had
purposely buried it, by carrying and throwing over it the volcanic
matter. This matter does not spread in any direction beyond the town,
over the fine plain which gently declines towards the bay of Naples. The
volcanic eruption was so confined in its course or its fall, as to bury
Pompeii, and only Pompeii: for the shower of ashes and pumice-stone
which descended in the immediate neighbourhood certainly made but a
slight difference in the elevation of the plain.
Where a town has been buried by lava, like Herculaneum, the process is
easily traced. You can follow the black, hardened lava from the cone of
the mountain to the sea, whose waters it invaded for “many a rood,” and
those who have seen the lava in its liquid state, when it flows on like
a river of molten iron, can conceive at once how it would bury every
thing it found in its way. There is often a confusion of ideas, among
those who have not had the advantages of visiting these interesting
places, as to the matter which covers Pompeii and Herculaneum: they
fancy they were both buried by lava. Herculaneum was so, and the work of
excavating there, was like digging in a quarry of very hard stone. The
descent into the places cleared is like the descent into a quarry or
mine, and you are always under ground, lighted by torches.
But Pompeii was covered by loose mud, pumice-stone, and ashes, over
which, in the course of centuries, there collected vegetable soil.
Beneath this shallow soil, the whole is very crumbly and easy to dig, in
few spots more difficult than one of our common gravel-pits. The matter
excavated is carried off in carts, and thrown outside of the town; and
in times when the labour is carried on with activity, as cart after cart
withdraws with the earth that covered them, you see houses entire,
except their roofs, which have nearly always fallen in, make their
appearance, and, by degrees, a whole street opens to the sun-shine or
the shower, just like the streets of any inhabited neighbouring town. It
is curious to observe, as the volcanic matter is removed, that the
houses are principally built of lava, the more ancient product of the
same Vesuvius, whose later results buried and concealed Pompeii for so
many ages.
[Illustration: Implements of building found at Pompeii.]
In the autumn of 1822 I saw Pompeii under very interesting
circumstances. It was a few days after an eruption of Vesuvius, which I
had witnessed, and which was considered by far the grandest eruption of
recent times. From Portici, our road was coated with lapilla or
pumice-stone, and a fine impalpable powder, of a palish grey hue, that
had been discharged from the mountain, round whose base we were winding.
In many places this coating was more than a foot deep, but it was pretty
equally spread, not accumulating in any particular spot. As we drove
into Pompeii our carriage wheels crushed this matter, which contained
the principal components of what had buried the city: it was lodged on
the edges of the houses’ walls, and on their roofs, (where the
Neapolitan government had furnished them with any); it lay inches thick
on the tops of the pillars and truncated columns of the ancient temples;
it covered all the floors or the houses that had no roofs, and concealed
the mosaics. In the amphitheatre, where we sat down to refresh
ourselves, we were obliged to make the guides clear it away with
shovels--it was everywhere. Looking from the upper walls of the
amphitheatre, we saw the whole country covered with it--trees and all
were coated with the pale-grey plaster, nor did it disappear for many
months after.
Some ignorant fellows at Naples pretended the fine ashes, or powder,
contained gold! Neapolitans began to collect it. They found no gold, but
it turned out to be an excellent thing for cleaning and polishing plate.
This dust continued to be blown from the mountain many days after the
eruption had ceased. It once made a pretty figure of me! I was riding up
the Posilippo road when it came on to rain; the rain brought down and
gave consistency to the dust, which adhered to my black coat and
pantaloons, until I looked as if I had been rolled in plaster of Paris.
But it travelled farther than Posilippo, for a friend of mine, an
officer in the navy, assured me it had fallen with rain on the deck of
his ship, when between three and four hundred miles from Naples and
Mount Vesuvius. There is an old story, that during one of the great
eruptions of this mountain, or Etna, cinders were thrown as far as
Constantinople: by substituting the fine powder I have alluded to, for
cinders, the story becomes not improbable.
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