On the second morning after our arrival in Naples, we took the seven
o'clock train, which leaves the Nineteenth Century for the first cycle
of the Christian Era, and, skirting the waters of the Neapolitan bay
almost the whole length of our journey, reached the railway station
of Pompeii in an hour. As we rode along by that bluest sea, we saw
the fishing-boats go out, and the foamy waves (which it would be an
insolent violence to call breakers) come in; we saw the mountains
slope their tawny and golden manes caressingly downward to the waters,
where the islands were dozing yet; and landward, on the left, we saw
Vesuvius, with his brown mantle of ashes drawn close about his throat,
reclining on the plain, and smoking a bland and thoughtful morning
pipe, of which the silver fumes curled lightly, lightly upward in the
sunrise.
We dismounted at the station, walked a few rods eastward through a
little cotton-field, and found ourselves at the door of Hotel Diomed,
where we took breakfast for a number of sesterces which I am sure
it would have made an ancient Pompeian stir in his urn to think of
paying. But in Italy one learns the chief Italian virtue, patience,
and we paid our account with the utmost good nature. There was
compensation in store for us, and the guide whom we found at the gate
leading up the little hill to Pompeii inclined the disturbed balance
in favor of our happiness. He was a Roman, spoke Italian that Beatrice
might have addressed to Dante, and was numbered Twenty-six. I suppose
it is known that the present Italian Government forbids people to
be pillaged in any way on its premises, and that the property of the
State is no longer the traffic of custodians and their pitiless
race. At Pompeii each person pays two francs for admission, and is
rigorously forbidden by recurrent sign-boards to offer money to the
guides. Ventisei (as we shall call him) himself pointed out one of
these notices in English, and did his duty faithfully without asking
or receiving fees in money. He was a soldier, like all the other
guides, and was a most intelligent, obliging fellow, with a
self-respect and dignity worthy of one of our own volunteer soldiers.
Ventisei took us up the winding slope, and led us out of this living
world through the Sea-gate of Pompeii back into the dead past--the
past which, with all its sensuous beauty and grace, and all its
intellectual power, I am not sorry to have dead, and for the most
part, buried. Our feet had hardly trodden the lava flagging of the
narrow streets when we came in sight of the laborers who were exhuming
the inanimate city. They were few in number, not perhaps a score, and
they worked tediously, with baskets to carry away the earth from the
excavation, boys and girls carrying the baskets, and several athletic
old women plying picks, while an overseer sat in a chair near by, and
smoked, and directed their exertions.
They dig down about eight or ten feet, uncovering the walls and
pillars of the houses, and the mason, who is at hand, places little
iron rivets in the stucco to prevent its fall where it is weak, while
an artist attends to wash and clean the frescos as fast as they are
exposed. The soil through which the excavation first passes is not
of great depth; the ashes which fell damp with scalding rain, in the
second eruption, are perhaps five feet thick; the rest is of that
porous stone which descended in small fragments during the first
eruption. A depth of at least two feet in this stone is always left
untouched by the laborers till the day when the chief superintendent
of the work comes out from Naples to see the last layers removed;
and it is then that the beautiful mosaic pavements of the houses are
uncovered, and the interesting and valuable objects are nearly always
found.
The wonder was, seeing how slowly the work proceeded, not that
two thirds of Pompeii were yet buried, but that one third had been
exhumed. We left these hopeless toilers, and went down-town into the
Forum, stepping aside on the way to look into one of the Pompeian
Courts of Common Pleas.