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.
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