power of nature. He looked down at the warehouses on the ancient seafront, where masses of distorted skeletons had been found huddled together in their death agony. Then he looked up at the villas where those same people had been eating and talking and going about their daily lives a few minutes before, everything left as they had abandoned it in those final moments of horror. There was clarity here, Jack reflected, extraordinary clarity, but also opacity. Teasing older history out of this site, before those final moments, was like watching an animation deconstructed, in which the first scenes were sharp and clear, then the next vague, increasingly out of focus, until images that had been dominated by people became a shadowland, with only the artefacts standing out and the people reduced to flitting forms barely discernible in the background.
That was the challenge for archaeologists at this place, Jack reflected, to give depth, to tell stories stretching back hours, days, years. And yet that final apocalyptic scene was a continuous draw, playing on the human fascination with death, with the macabre, the final moments of normality, what that would be like. Earlier, walking into the Roman houses with Costas, he had felt a curious unease, as if he were violating the intimate places of people who had never really left, places where he could still sense the mundane acts of the living, the private smells and sounds of the household. What had happened here had happened so quickly, quicker even than at Pompeii, that the place was still in a state of shock, frozen in that moment just before hell unleashed. Herculaneum still seemed to be reeling, as if the earthquakes of recent weeks were a nervous tremor that had begun on the night of the inferno almost two thousand years before.
‘That’s a hell of a view.’ Costas was standing beside him, and Jack snapped out of his reverie. ‘The past, the present, and the big bang. Says it all.’
Jack gave a tired smile. ‘I’m glad you see it too.’
‘So this is all solidified mud,’ Costas said.
‘Mud, ash, pumice, lava, everything picked up as it snowballed down the volcano.’
‘Pyroclastic flow?’
‘You remember Pliny the Elder, who wrote about opium?’ Jack said.
‘You bet. The workaholic admiral. Somehow found time to write an encyclopedia.’
‘Well, his teenage nephew, also called Pliny, was here that day too, staying at his uncle’s villa near the naval base at Misenum. The younger Pliny survived the eruption, his uncle didn’t. Years later he wrote a letter about it to the historian Tacitus, who wanted to know how the elder Pliny died. From a natural-history viewpoint it’s one of the most important documents to survive from antiquity, maybe even more so than his uncle’s encyclopedia. It’s not only a unique eyewitness account of the eruption of Vesuvius, it’s also one of the best scientific observations ever made of a volcanic eruption until modern times.’
‘Sounds like a chip off the old block. His uncle would have been proud of him.’ Costas watched Jack pull a small red book from his bag, its cover worn and battered. ‘You seem to have an endless supply of those. I had no idea so much literature survived from this period.’
‘It’s what didn’t survive that keeps me awake at night,’ Jack said, jerking his head towards the ruins in front of them. ‘That’s what’s so tantalizing about this place. But before we go there, listen to this. It’s crucial to understanding why Herculaneum and Pompeii look the way they do.’ He held the book up so that the site and the volcano were in the background, and then began to read marked passages. ‘ “Its general appearance can best be expressed as being like an umbrella pine, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches, I imagine because it was thrust upwards by the first blast and then left unsupported as the pressure subsided, or else it was borne down by its own weight so that it spread out and gradually dispersed.”’ He traced his finger down the page. ‘Then he describes ashes falling, “followed by bits of pumice and blackened stones, charred and cracked by the flames”. Later he says that the darkness was blacker and denser than any ordinary night, and on Vesuvius “broad sheets of fire and leaping flames blazed at several points”.’
‘Sound like a classic ash and pumice fallout,’ Costas said. ‘But that first bit, about the plume collapsing on itself, that’s a pyroclastic flow.’
‘That’s exactly the difference between the two sites. Pompeii was buried by fallout from the sky, mixed with poisonous gases. Afterwards, some of the rooftops still stuck out, which is why they’re not so well preserved today. Herculaneum was buried by landslides, tons of boiling mud and volcanic material, surging over the site each time the plume collapsed until the buildings were completely buried, up to ten metres above the rooftops.’
‘That’s a hell of an image, Jack. And that’s what those early Christians would have seen, the ones you think were in the Phlegraean Fields, I mean. Rings of fire at the leading edge of each pyroclastic flow, coming down the mountain at terrifying speed.’
‘The younger Pliny was watching all that from the villa at Misenum, only a mile or so south of Cumae, the Sibyl’s cave. More or less the same vantage point.’
‘Post-traumatic stress syndrome,’ Costas said.
‘Come again?’
‘Post-traumatic stress syndrome,’ Costas repeated. ‘The obsession with hellfire, damnation. I’ve been thinking about it. If this is the main place where Christianity spread from in the west, then they’re bound to have been affected by the experience, right? When we were flying in you mentioned the psychological fallout of the eruption. Once you’ve seen hell, you don’t forget it in a hurry. They were already halfway there in the Phlegraean Fields, living among the fumaroles and the entrance to the pagan underworld. Add a volcanic eruption, and you’ve got a pretty apocalyptic outlook. Am I right?’
‘For a nuts-and-bolts man, that’s a pretty fantastic idea. Ever thought of rewriting the history of Christian theology?’
‘Nope.’ For a moment they were quiet, both looking into the windows of the excavated Roman warehouse in front of them, dark and forbidding like the portholes of a sunken ship. ‘No survivors here,’ Costas murmured. ‘No one who stayed.’
‘It’s hard to know which would have been worse,’ Jack said thoughtfully. ‘Suffocated in superheated gas at Pompeii, or incinerated alive at Herculaneum.’
‘Come live by the sunny Bay of Naples,’ Costas murmured. ‘Today, all that happens is you get mugged or run over.’
‘Don’t speak too soon,’ Jack said. ‘Remember that picture of the 1944 eruption? The seismologists have been talking doom and gloom for decades now, and the earthquakes are pretty ominous.’
Costas shaded his eyes and squinted at the summit of the volcano, where the sunlight was beginning to radiate off the barren upper slopes. ‘Pliny was here? The elder one, I mean. In Herculaneum?’
‘According to his nephew, he took one look at the eruption and hared off in a warship towards the volcano, this side of the bay, under the mountain. It was supposedly a heroic mission to rescue a woman.’
‘The undoing of many a great man,’ Costas sighed.
‘It was hopeless. By the time he got here the shore was blocked with debris, floating pumice like sea ice. But instead of returning, he got his galley to row south to Stabiae, another town beyond Pompeii directly under the ash fallout. He stayed too long and was overcome by the fumes.’
‘Sounds like a Shakespearean love tragedy. Maybe he was really overcome by grief.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Jack said. ‘Not Pliny. Once he saw his girlfriend was doomed, he would have been on to something else. What he really wanted was to get close to the eruption. I can see him, notebook in hand, sniffing and identifying the sulphur, collecting pumice samples along the shoreline. At least he’d finished his Natural History.’
‘What with all that multi-tasking, he was probably heading for a burnout anyway.’
Jack rolled his eyes, then caught sight of two figures making their way down the entry ramp into the site, a woman and a man. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘It looks like we’re moving at last.’ He pushed off from the railing, and ruffled his hair. Maria was wearing desert boots, khaki combat trousers and a grey T-shirt, and her long black hair was tied back. She had a well-honed, lean physique, and the look suited her. Maurice Hiebermeyer was several paces behind her, a cell phone clamped to his ear, and cut a somewhat less svelte figure. He was slightly shorter than Maria, considerably overweight, and was wearing a curious assortment of safari gear over a pair of scuffed leather dress shoes. He was red faced and flustered, constantly pushing his little round glasses up his nose as he spoke into the phone. His shorts reached well below his knees and seemed perilously close to half-mast, almost miraculously free- floating.
‘Don’t say anything,’ Jack muttered to Costas. ‘Anything at all.’ He fought to keep a straight face, and glanced at Costas. ‘Anyway, you can smirk. When was the last time you looked in a mirror? You look like you’ve just walked
