Chapter 22. Still More Ruins, Mostly Italian Ones

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_ Chapter XXII. Still More Ruins, Mostly Italian Ones

When I reached Pompeii the situation was different. I could conjure up an illusion there--the biggest, most vivid illusion I have been privileged to harbor since I was a small boy. It was worth spending four days in Naples for the sake of spending half a day in Pompeii; and if you know Naples you will readily understand what a high compliment that is for Pompeii.

To reach Pompeii from Naples we followed a somewhat roundabout route; and that trip was distinctly worth while too. It provided a most pleasing foretaste of what was to come. Once we had cleared the packed and festering suburbs, we went flanking across a terminal vertebra of the mountain range that sprawls lengthwise of the land of Italy, like a great spiny-backed crocodile sunning itself, with its tail in the Tyrrhenian Sea and its snout in the Piedmonts; and when we had done this we came out on a highway that skirted the bay.

There were gaps in the hills, through which we caught glimpses of the city, lying miles away in its natural amphitheater; and at that distance we could revel in its picturesqueness and forget its bouquet of weird stenches. We could even forget that the automobile we had hired for the excursion had one foot in the grave and several of its most important vital organs in the repair shop. I reckon that was the first automobile built. No; I take that back. It never was a first--it must have been a second to start with.

I once owned a half interest in a sick automobile. It was one of those old-fashioned, late Victorian automobiles, cut princesse style, with a plaquette in the back; and it looked like a cross between a fiat-bed job press and a tailor's goose. It broke down so easily and was towed in so often by more powerful machines that every time a big car passed it on the road it stopped right where it was and nickered. Of a morning we would start out in that car filled with high hopes and bright anticipations, but eventide would find us returning homeward close behind a bigger automobile, in a relationship strongly suggestive of the one pictured in the well-known Nature Group entitled: "Mother Hippo, With Young." We refused an offer of four hundred dollars for that machine. It had more than four hundred dollars' worth of things the matter with it.

The car we chartered at Naples for our trip to Pompeii reminded me very strongly of that other car of which I was part owner. Between them there was a strong family resemblance, not alone in looks but in deportment also. For patient endurance of manifold ills, for an inexhaustible capacity in developing new and distressing symptoms at critical moments, for cheerful willingness to play foal to some other car's dam, they might have been colts out of the same litter. Nevertheless, between intervals of breaking down and starting up again, and being helped along by friendly passer-by automobiles, we enjoyed the ride from Naples. We enjoyed every inch of it.

Part of the way we skirted the hobs of the great witches' caldron of Vesuvius. On this day the resident demons must have been stirring their brew with special enthusiasm, for the smoky smudge which always wreathes its lips had increased to a great billowy plume that lay along the naked flanges of the devil mountain for miles and miles. Now we would go puffing and panting through some small outlying environ of the city. Always the principal products of such a village seemed to be young babies and macaroni drying in the sun. I am still reasonably fond of babies, but I date my loss of appetite for imported macaroni from that hour. Now we would emerge on a rocky headland and below us would be the sea, eternally young and dimpling like a maiden's cheek; but the crags above were eternally old and all gashed with wrinkles and seamed with folds, like the jowls of an ancient squaw. Then for a distance we would run right along the face of the cliff. Directly beneath us we could see little stone huts of fishermen clinging to the rocks just above high-water mark, like so many gray limpets; and then, looking up, we would catch a glimpse of the vineyards, tucked into man-made terraces along the upper cliffs, like bundled herbs on the pantry shelves of a thrifty housewife; and still higher up there would be orange groves and lemon groves and dusty-gray olive groves. Each succeeding picture was Byzantine in its coloring. Always the sea was molten blue enamel, and the far-away villages seemed crafty inlays of mosaic work; and the sun was a disk of hammered Grecian gold.

A man from San Francisco was sharing the car with us, and he came right out and said that if he were sure heaven would be as beautiful as the Bay of Naples, he would change all his plans and arrange to go there. He said he might decide to go there anyhow, because heaven was a place he had always heard very highly spoken of. And I agreed with him.

The sun was slipping down the western sky and was laced with red like a bloodshot eye, with a Jacob's Ladder of rainbow shafts streaming down from it to the water, when we turned inland; and after several small minor stops, while the automobile caught its breath and had the heaves and the asthma, we came to Pompeii over a road built of volcanic rock. I have always been glad that we went there on a day when visitors were few. The very solitude of the place aided the mind in the task of repeopling the empty streets of that dead city by the sea with the life that was hers nearly two thousand years ago. Herculaneum will always be buried, so the scientists say, for Herculaneum was snuggled close up under Vesuvius, and the hissing-hot lava came down in waves; and first it slugged the doomed town to death and then slagged it over with impenetrable, flint-hard deposits. Pompeii, though, lay farther away, and was entombed in dust and ashes only; so that it has been comparatively easy to unearth it and make it whole again. Even so, after one hundred and sixty-odd years of more or less desultory explorations, nearly a third of its supposed area is yet to be excavated.

It was in the year 1592 that an architect named Fontana, in cutting an aqueduct which was to convey the waters of the Sarno to Torre dell' Annunziata, discovered the foundations of the Temple of Isis, which stood near the walls on the inner or land side of the ancient city. It was at first supposed that he had dug into an isolated villa of some rich Roman; and it was not until 1748 that prying archaeologists hit on the truth and induced the Government to send a chain gang of convicts to dig away the accumulations of earth and tufa. But if it had been a modern Italian city that was buried, no such mistake in preliminary diagnosis could have occurred. Anybody would have known it instantly by the smell. I do not vouch for the dates--I copied them out of the guidebook; but my experience with Italian cities qualifies me to speak with authority regarding the other matter.

Afoot we entered Pompeii by the restored Marine Gate. Our first step within the walls was at the Museum, a comparatively modern building, but containing a fairly complete assortment of the relics that from time to time have been disinterred in various quarters of the city. Here are wall cabinets filled with tools, ornaments, utensils, jewelry, furniture--all the small things that fulfilled everyday functions in the first century of the Christian era. Here is a kit of surgical implements, and some of the implements might well belong to a modern hospital. There are foodstuffs --grains and fruits; wines and oil; loaves of bread baked in 79 A. D. and left in the abandoned ovens; and a cheese that is still in a fair state of preservation. It had been buried seventeen hundred years when they found it; and if only it had been permitted to remain buried a few years longer it would have been sufficiently ripe to satisfy a Bavarian, I think.

Grimmer exhibits are displayed in cases stretched along the center of the main hall--models of dead bodies discovered in the ruins and perfectly restored by pouring a bronze composition into the molds that were left in the hardened pumice after the flesh of these victims had turned to dust and their bones had crumbled to powder. Huddled together are the forms of a mother and a babe; and you see how, with her last conscious thought, the mother tried to cover her baby's face from the killing rain of dust and blistering ashes. And there is the shape of a man who wrapped his face in a veil to keep out the fumes, and died so. The veil is there, reproduced with a fidelity no sculptor could duplicate, and through its folds you may behold the agony that made his jaw to sag and his eyes to pop from their sockets.

Nearby is a dog, which in its last spasms of pain and fright curled up worm fashion, and buried its nose in its forepaws and kicked out with its crooked hind legs. Plainly dogs do not change their emotional natures with the passage of years. A dog died in Pompeii in 79 A. D. after exactly the same fashion that a dog might die to-day in the pound at Pittsburgh.

From here we went on into the city proper; and it was a whole city, set off by itself and not surrounded by those jarring modern incongruities that spoil the ruins of Rome for the person who wishes to give his fancy a slack rein. It is all here, looking much as it must have looked when Nero and Caligula reigned, and much as it will still look hundreds of years hence, for the Government owns it now and guards it and protects it from the hammer of the vandal and the greed of the casual collector. Here it is--all of it; the tragic theater and the comic theater; the basilica; the greater forum and the lesser one; the market place; the amphitheater for the games; the training school for the gladiators; the temples; the baths; the villas of the rich; the huts of the poor; the cubicles of the slaves; shops; offices; workrooms; brothels.

The roofs are gone, except in a few instances where they have been restored; but the walls stand and many of the detached pillars stand too; and the pavements have endured well, so that the streets remain almost exactly as they were when this was a city of live beings instead of a tomb of dead memories, with deep groovings of chariot wheels in the flaggings, and at each crossing there are stepping stones, dotting the roadbed like punctuation marks. At the public fountain the well curbs are worn away where the women rested their water jugs while they swapped the gossip of the town; and at nearly every corner is a groggery, which in its appointments and fixtures is so amazingly like unto a family liquor store as we know it that, venturing into one, I caught myself looking about for the Business Men's Lunch, with a collection of greasy forks in a glass receptacle, a crock of pretzels on the counter, and a sign over the bar reading: No Checks Cashed--This Means You!

In the floors the mosaics are as fresh as though newly applied; and the ribald and libelous Latin, which disappointed litigants carved on the stones at the back of the law court, looks as though it might have been scored there last week--certainly not further back than the week before that. A great many of the wall paintings in the interiors of rich men's homes have been preserved and some of them are fairly spicy as to subject and text. It would seem that in these matters the ancient Pompeiians were pretty nearly as broad-minded and liberal as the modern Parisians are. The mural decorations I saw in certain villas were almost suggestive enough to be acceptable matter for publication in a French comic paper; almost, but not quite. Mr. Anthony Comstock would be an unhappy man were he turned loose in Pompeii--unhappy for a spell, but after that exceedingly busy.

We lingered on, looking and marveling, and betweenwhiles wondering whether our automobile's hacking cough had got any better by resting, until the sun went down and the twilight came. Following the guidebook's advice we had seen the Colosseum in Rome by moonlight. There was a full moon on the night we went there. It came heaving up grandly, a great, round-faced, full-cream, curdy moon, rich with rennet and yellow with butter fats; but by the time we had worked our way south to Naples a greedy fortnight had bitten it quite away, until it was reduced to a mere cheese rind of a moon, set up on end against the delft-blue platter of a perfect sky. We waited until it showed its thin rim in the heavens, and then, in the softened half-glow, with the purplish shadows deepening between the brown-gray walls of the dead city, I just naturally turned my imagination loose and let her soar.

Standing there, with the stage set and the light effects just right, in fancy I repopulated Pompeii. I beheld it just as it was on a fair, autumnal morning in 79 A. D. With my eyes half closed, I can see the vision now. At first the crowds are massed and mingled in confusion, but soon figures detach themselves from the rest and reveal themselves as prominent personages. Some of them I know at a glance. Yon tall, imposing man, with the genuine imitation sealskin collar on his toga, who strides along so majestically, whisking his cane against his leg, can be no other than Gum Tragacanth, leading man of the Bon Ton Stock Company, fresh from his metropolitan triumphs in Rome and at this moment the reigning matinee idol of the South. This week he is playing Claude Melnotte in The Lady of Lyons; next week he will be seen in his celebrated characterization of Matthias in The Bells, with special scenery; and for the regular Wednesday and Saturday bargain matinees Lady Audley's Secret will be given.

Observe him closely. It is evident that he values his art. Yet about him there is no false ostentation. With what gracious condescension does he acknowledge the half-timid, half-daring smiles of all the little caramel-chewing Floras and Faunas who have made it a point to be on Main Street at this hour! With what careless grace does he doff his laurel wreath, which is of the latest and most modish fall block, with the bow at the back, in response to the waved greeting of Mrs. Belladonna Capsicum, the acknowledged leader of the artistic and Bohemian set, as she sweeps by in her chariot bound for Blumberg Brothers' to do a little shopping. She is not going to buy anything--she is merely out shopping.

Than this fair patrician dame, none is more prominent in the gay life of Pompeii. It was she who last season smoked a cigarette in public, and there is a report now that she is seriously considering wearing an ankle bracelet; withal she is a perfect lady and belongs to one of the old Southern families. Her husband has been through the bankruptcy courts twice and is thinking of going through again. At present he is engaged in promoting and writing a little life insurance on the side.

Now her equipage is lost in the throng and the great actor continues on his way, making a mental note of the fact that he has promised to attend her next Sunday afternoon studio tea. Near his own stage door he bumps into Commodious Rotunda, the stout comedian of the comic theater, and they pause to swap the latest Lambs' Club repartee. This done, Commodius hauls out a press clipping and would read it, but the other remembers providentially that he has a rehearshal on and hurriedly departs. If there are any press clippings to be read he has a few of his own that will bear inspection.

Superior Maxillary, managing editor of the Pompeiian "Daily News-Courier," is also abroad, collecting items of interest and subscriptions for his paper, with preference given to the latter. He enters the Last Chance Saloon down at the foot of the street and in a minute or two is out again, wiping his mustache on the back of his hand. We may safely opine that he has been taking a small ad. out in trade.

At the door of the county courthouse, where he may intercept the taxpayers as they come and go, is stationed our old friend, Colonel Pro Bono Publico. The Colonel has been running for something or other ever since Heck was a pup. To-day he is wearing his official campaign smile, for he is a candidate for county judge, subject to the action of the Republican party at the October primaries. He is wearing all his lodge buttons and likewise his G. A. R. pin, for this year he figures on carrying the old-soldier vote.

See who comes now! It is Rigor Mortis, the worthy coroner. At sight of him the Colonel uplifts his voice in hoarsely jovial salutation:

"Rigsy, my boy," he booms, "how are you? And how is Mrs. M. this morning?"

"Well, Colonel," answers his friend, "my wife ain't no better. She's mighty puny and complaining. Sometimes I get to wishing the old lady would get well--or something!"

The Colonel laughs, but not loudly. That wheeze was old in 79. In front of the drug-store on the corner a score of young bloods, dressed in snappy togas for Varsity men, are skylarking. They are especially brilliant in their flashing interchanges of wit and humor, because the Mastodon Minstrels were here only last week, with a new line of first-part jokes. Along the opposite side of the street passes Nux Vomica, M.D., with a small black case in his hand, gravely intent on his professional duties. Being a young physician, he wears a beard and large-rimmed eyeglasses. Young Ossius Dome sees him and hails him.

"Oh, Doc!" he calls out. "Come over here a minute. I've got some brand-new limerickii for you. Tertiary Tonsillitis got 'em from a traveling man he met day before yesterday when he was up in the city laying in his stock of fall and winter armor."

The healer of ills crosses over; and as the group push themselves in toward a common center I hear the voice of the speaker:

"Say, they're all bully; but this is the bullissimus one of the lot. It goes like this:

"'There was a young maid of Sorrento,
Who said to her--'"

I have regretted ever since that at this juncture I came to and so failed to get the rest of it. I'll bet that was a peach of a limerick. It started off so promisingly. _

Read next: Chapter 23. Muckraking In Old Pompeii

Read previous: Chapter 21. Old Masters And Other Ruins

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