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.
