You have read, no doubt, of their discovering, a year or two since,
in making an excavation in a Pompeian street, the molds of four human
bodies, three women and a man, who fell down, blind and writhing, in
the storm of fire eighteen hundred years ago; whose shape the settling
and hardening ashes took; whose flesh wasted away, and whose bones lay
there in the hollow of the matrix till the cunning of this time found
them, and, pouring liquid plaster round the skeletons, clothed them
with human form again, and drew them forth into the world once more.
There are many things in Pompeii which bring back the gay life of the
city, but nothing which so vividly reports the terrible manner of her
death as these effigies of the creatures that actually shared it. The
man in the last struggle has thrown himself upon his back and taken
his doom sturdily--there is a sublime calm in his rigid figure. The
women lie upon their faces, their limbs tossed and distorted, their
drapery tangled and heaped about them, and in every fibre you see how
hard they died. One presses her face into her handkerchief to draw
one last breath unmixed with scalding steam; another's arms are wildly
thrown abroad to clutch at help; another's hand is appealingly raised,
and on her slight fingers you see the silver hoops with which her poor
dead vanity adorned them.
The guide takes you aside from the street into the house where they
lie, and a dreadful shadow drops upon your heart as you enter their
presence. Without, the hell-storm seems to fall again, and the whole
sunny plain to be darkened with its ruin, and the city to send up the
tumult of her despair.
What is there left in Pompeii to speak of after this? The long street
of tombs outside the walls? Those that died before the city's burial
seem to have scarcely a claim to the solemnity of death.
Shall we go see Diomed's Villa, and walk through the freedman's long
underground vaults, where his friends thought to be safe, and were
smothered in heaps? The garden-ground grows wild among its broken
columns with weeds and poplar saplings; in one of the corridors they
sell photographs, on which, if you please, Ventisei has his bottle,
or drink-money. So we escape from the doom of the calamity, and so, at
last, the severely forbidden _buonamano_ is paid. A dog may die many
deaths besides choking with butter.
We return slowly through the city, where we have spent the whole day,
from nine till four o'clock. We linger on the way, imploring Ventisei
if there is not something to be seen in this or that house; we make
our weariness an excuse for sitting down, and cannot rend ourselves
from the bliss of being in Pompeii.
At last we leave its gates, and swear each other to come again many
times while in Naples, and never go again.
Perhaps it was as well. You cannot repeat great happiness.