fainting with thirst and choked with fine sand, were suddenly revived
in spirit by the sight of a sheet of water in the distance. In it were
mirrored the trees and villages, gardens and pretty houses of a
cultivated land, all reversed. The blue sky was mirrored there, too,
just as you can see the banks of a lake, and the sky that bends over
it, in its calm waters. The soldiers rushed towards the place, frantic
with joy, but when they got there they found nothing but the hot
sands. Again they saw the lake at a distance, and made another
headlong rush, only to be again disappointed. This happened
frequently, until the men were in despair, and imagined that some
demon was tormenting them. But there happened to be with this army a
wise man, who did not trust entirely to his own eyes, and although he
saw exactly what the others did, he did not believe that there was
anything there but air. He set to work to investigate it, and found
out that the whole thing was an illusion--it was the reflection of the
gardens and villages that were on the river Nile, thrown up into the
air, like the ships the sailors saw, only in the clear atmosphere of
Egypt these images are projected to a long distance. And demons had
nothing whatever to do with it.
People used to believe in a fairy called Fata Morgana. Wonderful
things were said of her, and her dominions were in the air, where she
had large cities which she sometimes amused herself by turning into a
variety of shapes. The cities were often seen by dwellers on the
Mediterranean sea-coast. Sometimes one of them would be like an
earthly city, with houses and churches, and nearly always with a
background of mountains. In a moment it would change into a confused
mass of long colonnades, lofty towers, and battlements waving with
flags, and then the mountains reeling and falling, a long row of
windows would appear glowing with rainbow colors, and perhaps, in
another instant, all this would be swept away, and nothing be seen but
gloomy cypress trees.
[Illustration]
These things can be seen now occasionally, as of old, but they are no
longer in Fairyland. Now we know that they are the images of cities
and mountains on the coast, and the reason they assume these
fantastic forms is that the layers of air through which the rays of
light pass are curved and irregular.
[Illustration]
A gigantic figure haunts the Vosges Mountains, known by the name of
"The Spectre of the Brocken." The ignorant peasants were, in former
times, in great fear of it, thinking it a supernatural being, and
fancying that it brought upon them all manner of evil. And it must be
confessed it was a fearful sight to behold suddenly upon the summit of
a lofty mountain an immense giant, sometimes pointing in a threatening
attitude to a village below, as if dooming it to destruction;
sometimes with arms upraised, as if invoking ruin upon all the
country; and sometimes stalking along with such tremendous strides as
to make but one step from peak to peak; often dwarfing himself to
nothingness, and again stretching up until his head is in the clouds,
then disappearing entirely for a moment, only to reappear more
formidable than before.
But now the Spectre of the Brocken is no longer an object of fear.
Why? Because men have found him out, and he is nothing in the world
but a shadow. When the sun is in the right position, an ordinary-sized
man on a lower mountain will see a gigantic shadow of himself thrown
upon a cloud beyond the Brocken, though it appears to be on the
mountain itself, and it is so perfect a representation that it is
difficult to believe it is only a shadow. But it can be easily proved.
If the man stoops to pick up anything, down goes the spectre; if he
raises his hand, so does the spectre; if he takes a step of two feet,
the spectre takes one of miles; if he raises his hat, the spectre
politely returns his salute.
When you behold anything marvellous, and your eyes tell you that you
have seen some ghostly thing, don't believe them, but investigate the
matter closely, and you will find it no more a phantom than the mirage
or the Spectre of the Brocken.
A CITY UNDER THE GROUND.
Under the bright skies of Italy, in a picturesque valley, with the
mountains close at hand and the blue waves of the Mediterranean
rolling at a little distance--at the foot of wonderful Vesuvius, green
and fertile, and covered with vines to its very top, from which smoke
is perpetually escaping, and in whose heart fires are eternally
raging, in this beautiful valley stands the city of Pompeii.
[Illustration: CLEARING OUT A NARROW STREET IN POMPEII.]
You might, however, remain upon the spot a long time and never find
out that there was a city there. All around you would see groves and
vineyards, and cultivated fields and villas. For the city is beneath
your feet. Under the vineyards and orchards are temples filled with
statues, houses with furniture, pictures, and all homelike things.
Nothing is wanting there but life. For Pompeii is a buried city, and
fully two-thirds of it has not yet been excavated.
But a short walk from this place will bring you to the spot where
excavations have been made, and about one-third of the ancient city
lies once more under the light of heaven. It is doubtful whether you
can see it when you get to it for the mounds of ashes and rubbish
piled around. But, clambering over these, you will pay forty cents for
admission, and pass through a turnstile into a street where you will
see long rows of ruined houses, and empty shops, and broken temples,
and niches which have contained statues of heathen gods and goddesses.
As you wander about you will come across laborers busily employed in
clearing away rubbish in obstructed streets. It is a very lively
scene, as you can see in the picture. Men are digging zealously into
the heaps of earth and rubbish, and filling baskets which the
bare-footed peasant-girls carry to the cars at a little distance. A
railroad has been built expressly to carry away the earth. The cars
are drawn by mules. The girls prefer carrying their baskets on their
heads. The men have to dig carefully, for there is no knowing when
they may come across some rare and valuable work of art.
The excavations are conducted in this manner. Among the trees, and in
the cultivated fields there can be traced little hillocks, which are
pretty regular in form and size. These indicate the blocks of houses
in the buried city, and, of course, the streets run between them.
After the land is bought from the owners, these streets are carefully
marked out, the vines are cleared away, the trees cut down, and the
digging out of these streets is commenced from the top. The work is
carried on pretty steadily at present, but it is only within the last
few years that it has been conducted with any degree of enterprise and
skill.
[Illustration: A CLEARED STREET IN POMPEII.]
Let us leave this rubbish, and go into a street that has already been
cleared. The first thing you will observe is that it is very narrow.
It is evidently not intended for a fashionable drive. But few of the
streets are any wider than this one. The greatest width of a street in
Pompeii is seven yards, and some are only two and a half yards,
sidewalks and all. The middle of the street is paved with blocks of
lava. The sidewalks are raised, and it is evident the owners of the
houses were allowed to put any pavement they pleased in front of
their dwellings. In one place you will see handsome stone flags the
next pavement may be nothing but soil beaten down, while the next will
be costly marble.
The upper stories of the houses are in ruins. It is probable,
therefore, that they were built of wood, while the lower stories,
being of stone, still remain. They had few windows on the street, as
the Pompeiians preferred that these should look out on an inner square
or court. To the right of the picture is a small monument, and in the
left-hand corner is a fountain, or rather the stone slabs that once
enclosed a fountain.
As we walk slowly up the solitary street, we think of the busy,
restless feet that trod these very stones eighteen hundred years ago.
Our minds go back to the year of our Lord 79, when there was high
carnival in the little city of Pompeii, with its thirty thousand
people, when the town was filled with strangers who had come to the
great show; at the time of an election, when politicians were scheming
and working to get themselves or their friends into power; when gayly
dressed crowds thronged the streets on their way to the amphitheatre
to see the gladiatorial fight; when there was feasting and revelry in
every house; when merchants were exulting in the midst of thriving
trade; when the pagan temples were hung with garlands and filled with
gifts; when the slaves were at work in the mills, the kitchens, and
the baths; when the gladiators were fighting the wild beasts of the
arena--then it was that a swift destruction swept over the city and
buried it in a silence that lasted for centuries.
Vesuvius, the volcano so near them, but which had been silent so many
years that they had ceased to dread it, suddenly woke into activity,
and threw out of its summit a torrent of burning lava and ashes, and
in a few short hours buried the two cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii
so completely that two centuries after no one could tell the precise
place where they had stood, and men built houses and cultivated farms
over the spot, never dreaming that cities lay beneath them.
[Illustration: THE ATRIUM IN THE HOUSE OF PANSA RESTORED.]
But here we are at the house of Pansa. Let us go in. We do not wait
for any invitation from the owner, for he left it nearly two thousand
years ago, and his descendants, if he have any, are totally ignorant
of their illustrious descent. First we enter a large hall called the
Atrium. You can see from the magnificence of this apartment in what
style the rich Pompeiians lived. The floor is paved in black and white
mosaic, with a marble basin in the centre. The doors opening from
this hall conduct us to smaller apartments, two reception rooms, a
parlor, the library, and six diminutive bedrooms, only large enough to
contain a bedstead, and with no window. It must have been the fashion
to sleep with open doors, or the sleepers must inevitably have been
suffocated.
At the end of the Atrium you see a large court with a fountain in the
middle. This was called the Peristyle. Around it was a portico with
columns. To the left were three bedchambers and the kitchen, and to
the right three bedchambers and the dining-room. Behind the Peristyle
was a grand saloon, and back of this the garden. The upper stories of
this house have entirely disappeared. This is a spacious house, but
there are some in the city more beautifully decorated, with paintings
and mosaics.
When the rubbish was cleared out of this house, much of Pansa's costly
furniture was found to be in perfect preservation, and also the
statues. In the library were found a few books, not quite destroyed;
in the kitchen the coal was in the fire-places; and the kitchen
utensils of bronze and terra-cotta were in their proper places. Nearly
all of the valuable portable things found in Pompeii have been carried
away and placed in the museum at Naples.
This Pansa was candidate for the office of ædile, or mayor of the
city, at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius. We know this from the
placards that were found posted in various parts of the city, and
which were as fresh and clean as on the day they were written. These
placards, or posters, were very numerous, and there seem to have been
a great many candidates for the various city offices; and it is very
evident, from the inscriptions on the houses, on the walls of public
buildings and the baths, that party feeling ran quite as high in this
luxurious city of ancient times as it does now in any city in America.
For these Pompeiians had no newspaper, and expressed their sentiments
on the walls, and they have consequently come down to us of the
present day.
These inscriptions not only related to politics, but referred often to
social and domestic matters, and, taken in connection with the
pictures of home scenes that were painted on the walls of the houses,
give us such accurate and vivid accounts of the people that it is easy
to imagine them all back in their places, and living the old life over
again. Pansa, and Paratus, and Sallust, and Diomed, and Julia, and
Sabina seem to be our own friends, with whom we have often visited the
Forum or the theatre, and gone home to dine.
That curious-looking pin with a Cupid on it is a lady's hair-pin. The
necklaces are in the form of serpents, which were favorite symbols
with the ancients. The stands of their tables, candelabra, &c., were
carved into grotesque or beautiful designs, and even the kitchen
utensils were made graceful with figures of exquisite workmanship, and
were sometimes fashioned out of silver.
Among the pretty things found in Pompeiian houses I will mention the
following:--
A bronze statuette of a Dancing Faun, with head and arms uplifted;
every muscle seems to be in motion, and the whole body dancing.
Another of a boy with head bent forward, and the whole body in the
attitude of listening. Then there is a fine group of statuary
representing the mighty Hercules holding a stag bent over his knee;
another of the beautiful Apollo with his lyre in his hand leaning
against a pillar. There are figures of huntsmen in full chase, and of
fishermen sitting patiently and quietly "waiting for a bite." A very
celebrated curiosity is the large urn or vase of blue glass, with
figures carved on it in half relief, in white. (For the ancients knew
how to carve glass.) These white figures look as if made of the finest
ivory instead of being carved in glass. They represent masks
enveloped in festoons of vine tendrils, loaded with clusters of
grapes, mingled with other foliage, on which birds are swinging,
children plucking grapes or treading them under foot, or blowing on
flutes, or tumbling over each other in frolicsome glee. This superb
urn, which is like nothing we have nowadays, is supposed to have been
intended to hold the ashes of the dead. For it was a custom of ancient
days to burn the bodies of the dead, and place the urns containing
their ashes in magnificent tombs.
[Illustration: ORNAMENTS FROM POMPEII.]
Instead of hanging pictures as we do, the Pompeiians generally had
them painted upon the smoothly prepared walls of their halls and
saloons. The ashes of Vesuvius preserved these paintings so well that,
when first exposed to the light, the coloring on them is fresh and
vivid, and every line and figure clear and distinct. But the sunlight
soon fades them. They are very beautiful, and teach us much about the
beliefs and customs of the old city.
Lovely and graceful as were these pictures, the floors of the houses
are much more wonderful. They are marvels of art. Not only are flowers
and running vines and complicated designs there laid in mosaics, but
pictures that startle with their life-like beauty. There are many of
these, but perhaps the finest of all is the one found in the same
house with the Dancing Faun. It represents a battle. A squadron of
victorious Greeks is rushing upon part of a Persian army. The latter
are turning to flee. Those around the vanquished Persian king think
only of their safety, but the king, with his hand extended towards his
dying general, turns his back upon his flying forces, and invites
death. Every figure in it seems to be in motion. You seem to hear the
noise of battle, and to see the rage, fear, triumph, and pity
expressed by the different faces. Think of such wonderful effects
being produced by putting together pieces of glass and marble, colored
enamel, and various stones! But, leaving all these beauties, and
descending to homely everyday life, we will go into a bakery. Here is
one in a good state of preservation.
[Illustration: DISCOVERIES OF LOAVES OF BREAD BAKED EIGHTEEN HUNDRED
YEARS AGO.]
It is a mill and bakery together. The Pompeiians sent their grain to
the baker, and he ground it into flour, and, making it into dough,
baked it and sent back loaves of bread. The mills look like huge
hour-glasses. They are made of two cone-shaped stones with the small
ends together. The upper one revolved, and crushed the grain between
the stones. They were worked sometimes by a slave, but oftenest by a
donkey. There is the trough for kneading the bread, the arched oven,
the cavity below for the ashes, the large vase for water with which to
sprinkle the crust and make it "shiny," and the pipe to carry off the
smoke. In one of these ovens were found eighty-one loaves, weighing a
pound each, whole, hard, and black, in the order in which they had
been placed on the 23d of November, 79. Suppose the baker who placed
them there had been told that eighteen hundred years would elapse
before they would be taken out!
Having wandered about the city, and looked at all the streets,
monuments, and dwellings, and having seen very much more than I have
here described--the Forum, or Town Hall, the theatres, baths, stores,
temples, the street where the tombs are--and having looked at the rude
cross carved on a wall, showing that the religion of Christ had
penetrated to this Pagan city--having examined all these, you will
visit the amphitheatre.
To do this we must leave the part of the city that has interested us
so much, and, passing once more through the vineyards and orchards
that still cover a large portion of the city, descend again into a
sort of ravine, where we will find the amphitheatre. It was quite as
the end of the city, next to the wall. It is a circus. The large open
space in the centre was called the arena. Here there were fierce and
bloody fights; wild beasts fought with each other, or with men trained
to the business and called gladiators, and these gladiators often
fought with each other--all for the amusement of the people, who were
never satisfied unless a quantity of blood was shed, and many were
killed. This arena was covered with sand, and a ditch filled with
water separated it from the seats.
The seats arose from this arena, tier above tier. There were three
divisions of them, separating the rich from the middle class, and
these again from the slaves. It was well arranged for the comfort of
the audience, having wide aisles and plenty of places of exit. The
whole was covered with an awning. In the wall around the arena are the
holes where thick iron bars were inserted as a precaution against the
bounds of the panthers. To the right of the principal entrance are two
square rooms with gratings where the wild beasts were kept. This
amphitheatre would hold twenty thousand persons!
[Illustration: THE AMPHITHEATRE OF POMPEII.]
We visit this place last because it was while the amphitheatre was
crowded with people intent upon the bloody spectacle; while wild
beasts, and men more cruel than the beasts, were fighting together,
and spectators less pitiful than either were greedily enjoying it,
that suddenly the ground trembled violently. This perhaps was not
perceived in the circus, on account of the excitement all were in, and
the noise that was going on in the arena. But it was soon followed by
a whirlwind of ashes, and lurid flashes of flame darted across the
sky. The beasts were instantly tamed, and cowered down in abject
terror, and the gladiators, for the first time in their lives, grew
pale with fear. Then the startled crowd within the vast building heard
from the streets the fearful cry: "Vesuvius is on fire!" In an instant
the spectacle is forgotten; the terrified crowd rush out of the
building, and happy is it for them that the architects have provided
so many places of exit. Some fled towards the sea, and some to the
open country. Those who reached the ships were saved, but woe to those
who went to their homes to collect their valuables to take with them,
or who took refuge under cover in the cellars.
After the rain of ashes came a shower of blazing stones, which fell
uninterruptedly, setting fire to all parts of the city and blocking up
the streets with burning masses. And then a fresh storm of ashes
sweeping down would partly smother the flames, but, blocking up the
doorways, would stifle those within the houses. And to add to the
horror, the volumes of smoke that poured from the mountain caused a
darkness deeper than night to settle on the doomed city, through which
the people groped their way, except when lighted by the burning
houses. What horror and confusion in the streets! Friends seeking each
other with faces of utter despair; the groans of the dying mingled
with the crash of falling buildings; the pelting of the fiery stones;
the shrieks of women and children; the terrific peals of thunder.
So ended the day, and the dreadful scene went on far into the night.
In a few hours the silence of death fell upon the city. The ashes
continued to pour steadily down upon it, and drifting into every
crevice of the buildings, and settling like a closely-fitting shroud
around the thousands and thousands of dead bodies, preserved all that
the flames had spared for the eyes of the curious who should live
centuries after. And a gray ashy hill blotted out Pompeii from the
sight of that generation.
Hundreds of skeletons have already been found, and their expressive
attitudes tell us the story of their death. We know of the pitiful
avarice and vanity of many of the rich ladies who went to their homes
to save their jewels, and fell with them clutched tightly in their
hands. One woman in the house of the Faun was loaded with jewels, and
had died in the vain effort to hold up with her outstretched arms the
ceiling that was crushing down upon her. But women were not the only
ones who showed an avaricious disposition in the midst of the thunders
and flames of Vesuvius. Men had tried to carry off their money, and
the delay had cost them their lives, and they were buried in the ashes
with the coins they so highly valued. Diomed, one of the richest men
of Pompeii, abandoned his wife and daughters and was fleeing with a
bag of silver when he was stifled in front of his garden by noxious
vapors. In the cellar of his house were found the corpses of seventeen
women and children.
A priest was discovered in the temple of Isis, holding fast to an axe
with which he had cut his way through two walls, and died at the
third. In a shop two lovers had died in each other's arms. A woman
carrying a baby had sought refuge in a tomb, but the ashes had walled
them tightly in. A soldier died bravely at his post, erect before a
city gate, one hand on his spear and the other on his mouth, as if to
keep from breathing the stifling gases.
Thus perished in a short time over thirty thousand citizens and
strangers in the city of Pompeii, now a city under the ground.
THE COACHMAN.
[Illustration]
When a boy sees a coachman driving two showy, high-stepping horses
along the street, or, better still, over a level country road, with
his long whip curling in the air, which whip he now and then flirts so
as to make a sharp, cracking noise over the horses' heads, and
occasionally brings down with a light flick upon the flanks of the
right or left horse,--the carriage, shining with varnish and plate,
rolling along swiftly and smoothly,--the little boy is apt to think
that coachman must be a very happy mortal.
If the man on the carriage-box sees the boy looking at him with so
much admiration, he will probably throw him a jolly little laugh and a
friendly nod, and, gathering up the reins and drawing them in tightly
so as to arch the horses' necks and make them look prouder and more
stately than before, he will give a loud crack with his curling
whip-lash, and the horses will start off at a rapid trot, and the
carriage will sweep around a curve in the road so gracefully that the
boy's heart will be filled with envy--not of the persons in the
carriage--oh, no! riding in a close carriage is a very tame and dull
affair; but he will envy the driver. An ambition springs up in his
mind at that instant. Of all things in the world he would rather be a
coachman! That shall be his business when he grows up to be a man. And
the chances are that when he goes home he tells his father so.
But if the little boy, instead of lying tucked in his warm bed, should
be set down at twelve o'clock at night upon the pavement in front of
that great house with the tall lamps on the steps, he would see this
same coachman under conditions that he would not envy at all.