I Had Heard That If You Will Stand Upon Your Rights In Such
A Matter The Company Will Have To Put On Another Car For You.
But I was
now dealing with the Italian government, which has nationalized the
railroads, but has apparently not yet repleted the rolling stock; and
when the conductor found us places in a second-class carriage, rather
than quarrel with a government which had troubles enough already I got
aboard.
I suppose really that I have not much public spirit, and that
the little I have I commonly leave at home; in travelling it is
burdensome. Besides, the second-class carriage would have been
comfortable enough if it had not been so dirty; it looked as if it had
not been washed since it was flooded with liquid ashes at the
destruction of Pompeii, though they seemed to be cigar ashes.
The country through which we made the hour's run was sympathetically
squalid. We had, to be sure, the sea on one side, and that was clean
enough; but the day was gray, and the sea was responsively gray; while
the earth on the other side was torn and ragged, with people digging
manure into the patches of broccoli, and gardening away as if it had
been April instead of January. There were shabby villas, with
stone-pines and cypresses herding about the houses, and tatters of
life-plant overhanging their shabby walls; there were stucco shanties
which the men and women working in the fields would lurk in at
nightfall. At places there was some cheerful boat building, and at one
place there was a large macaroni manufactory, with far stretches of the
product dangling in hanks and skeins from rows of trellises. We passed
through towns where women and children swarmed, working at doorways and
playing in the dim, cold streets; from the balconies everywhere winter
melons hung in nets, dozens and scores of them, such as you can buy at
the Italian fruiterers' in New York, and will keep buying when once you
know how good they are. In Naples they sell them by the slice in the
street, the fruiterer carrying a board on his head with the slices
arranged in an upright coronal like the rich, barbaric head-dress of
some savage prince.
Our train was slow and our car was foul, but nothing could keep us from
arriving at Pompeii in very good spirits. The entrance to the dead city
is gardened about with a cemeterial prettiness of evergreens; but, after
you have bought your ticket and been assigned your guide, you pass
through this decorative zone and find yourself in the first of streets
where the past makes no such terms with the present. If some of the
houses of an ampler plan had little spaces beyond the atrium planted
with such flowers as probably grew there two thousand years ago, and
stuck round with tiny figurines, it was to the advantage of the people's
fancy; but it did not appeal so much to the imagination as the mould and
moss, and the small, weedy network that covered the ground in the
roofless chambers and temples and basilicas, where the broken columns
and walls started from the floors which this unmeditated verdure painted
in the favorite hue of ruin.
Most of the places I re-entered through my recollection of them, but to
this subjective experience there was added that of seeing much newer and
vaster things than I remembered. That sad population of the victims of
the disaster, restored to the semhlance of life, or perhaps rather of
death, in plaster casts taken from the moulds their decay had left in
the hardening ashes, had much increased in the melancholy museum where
one visits them the first thing within the city gates. But their effect
was not cumulative; there were more writhing women and more contorted
men; but they did not make their tragedy more evident than it had been
when I saw them, fewer but not less affecting, all those years ago. It
was the same with the city itself; Pompeii had grown, like the rest of
the world in the interval, and, although it had been dug tip instead of
built up, a good third had been added to the count of its streets and
houses. There were not, so far as I could see, more ruts from
chariot-wheels in the lava blocks of the thoroughfares, but some
convincingly two-storied dwellings had been exhumed, and others with
ceilings in better condition than those of the earlier excavations;
there were more all-but-unbroken walls and columns; some mosaic floors
were almost as perfect as when their dwellers fled over them out of the
stifling city. But upon the whole the result was a greater monotony; the
revelation of house after house, nearly the same in design, did not gain
im-pressiveness from their repetition; just as the case would be if the
dwellings of an old-fashioned cross-town street in New York were dug out
two thousand years after their submergence by an eruption of Orange
Mountain. The identity of each of the public edifices is easily attested
to the archaeologist, but the generally intelligent, as the generally
unintelligent, visitor must take the archaeologist's word for the fact.
One temple is much like another in its stumps of columns and vague
foundations and broken altars. Among the later discoveries certain of
the public baths are in the best repair, both structurally and
decoratively, and in these one could replace the antique life with the
least wear and tear of the imagination.
I could not tell which the several private houses were; but the
guide-books can, and there I leave the specific knowledge of them; their
names would say nothing to the reader if they said nothing to me. In
Pompeii, where all the houses were rather small, some of the new ones
were rather large, though not larger than a few of the older ones.
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