It is proper, after seeing the sites of some of the principal temples
in Pompeii (such as those of Jupiter and Venus), to cross the fields
that cover a great breadth of the buried city, and look into the
amphitheatre, where, as every body knows, the lions had no stomach
for Glaucus on the morning of the fatal eruption. The fields are now
planted with cotton, and of course we thought those commonplaces about
the wonder the Pompeians would feel could they come back to see that
New-World plant growing above their buried homes. We might have told
them, the day of our visit, that this cruel plant, so long watered
with the tears of slaves, and fed with the blood of men, was now an
exile from its native fields, where war was plowing with sword and
shot the guilty land, and rooting up the subtlest fibres of the
oppression in which cotton had grown king. And the ghosts of wicked
old Pompeii, remembering the manifold sins that called the fires of
hell to devour her, and thinking on this exiled plant, the latest
witness of God's unforgetting justice, might well have shuddered,
through all their shadow, to feel how terribly He destroys the enemies
of Nature and man.
But the only Pompeian presences which haunted our passage of the
cotton-field were certain small
"Phantoms of delight,"
with soft black eyes and graceful ways, who ran before us and plucked
the bolls of the cotton and sold them to us. Embassies bearing red and
white grapes were also sent out of the cottages to our excellencies;
and there was some doubt of the currency of the coin which we gave
these poor children in return.
There are now but few peasants living on the land over the head of
Pompeii, and the Government allows no sales of real estate to be made
except to itself. The people who still dwell here can hardly be said
to own their possessions, for they are merely allowed to cultivate
the soil. A guard stationed night and day prevents them from making
excavations, and they are severely restricted from entering the
excavated quarters of the city alone.
The cotton whitens over two thirds of Pompeii yet interred: happy the
generation that lives to learn the wondrous secrets of that sepulchre!
For, when you have once been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the past
takes deeper hold on your imagination than any living city, and
becomes and is the metropolis of your dreamland forever. O marvelous
city! who shall reveal the cunning of your spell? Something not
death, something not life--something that is the one when you turn
to determine its essence as the other! What is it comes to me at this
distance of that which I saw in Pompeii? The narrow and curving, but
not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that Neapolitan November
falling into them, or clouding their wheel-worn lava with the black,
black shadows of the many-tinted walls; the houses, and the gay
columns of white, yellow, and red; the delicate pavements of mosaic;
the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead fountains; inanimate garden
spaces with pygmy statues suited to their littleness; suites of fairy
bed-chambers, painted with exquisite frescos; dining-halls with
joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their walls; the ruinous sites
of temples; the melancholy emptiness of booths and shops and jolly
drinking-houses; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern Pompeian
drawing water from a well there; the baths with their roofs perfect
yet, and the stucco bass-reliefs all but unharmed; around the whole,
the city wall crowned with slender poplars; outside the gates, the
long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way stretching on to Stabiae;
and, in the distance, Vesuvius, brown and bare, with his fiery breath
scarce visible against the cloudless heaven;--these are the things
that float before my fancy as I turn back to look at myself walking
those enchanted streets, and to wonder if I could ever have been so
blest.
For there is nothing on the earth, or under it, like Pompeii.
The amphitheatre, to which we came now, after our stroll across the
cotton-fields, was small, like the vastest things in Pompeii, and had
nothing of the stately magnificence of the Arena at Verona, nor any
thing of the Roman Coliseum's melancholy and ruinous grandeur. But its
littleness made it all the more comfortable and social, and, seated
upon its benches under a cool awning, one could have almost chatted
across the arena with one's friends; could have witnessed the
spectacle on the sands without losing a movement of the quick
gladiators, or an agony of the victim given to the beasts--which must
have been very delightful to a Pompeian of companionable habits
and fine feelings. It is quite impossible, however, that the bouts
described by Bulwer as taking place all at the same time on the arena
should really have done so: the combatants would have rolled and
tumbled and trampled over each other an hundred times in the narrow
space.
Of all the voices with which it once rang the poor little amphitheatre
has kept only an echo. But this echo is one of the most perfect ever
heard: prompt clear, startling, it blew back the light chaff we threw
to it with amazing vehemence, and almost made us doubt if it were not
a direct human utterance. Yet how was Ventisei to know our names? And
there was no one else to call them but ourselves. Our "_dolce duca_"
gathered a nosegay from the crumbling ledges, and sat down in the cool
of the once-cruel cells beneath, and put it prettily together for the
ladies. When we had wearied ourselves with the echo he arose and led
us back into Pompeii.