Their Want Of A Pagan Past In Common With Us May Be What
Keeps Us Alien Even More Than The Want Of A Common Christian Tradition.
"The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome"
Could never mean to our brown companions what they meant to us; but they
put on a polite air of being interested in the Graeco-Roman ruin, and
were so gentle and friendly that one could almost feel they were
fellow-men. Very likely they were; at any rate, until we are at war with
them I shall believe so.
Our guide, whom we had really bought the whole use of at the gate,
thriftily took on another party, with our leave, and it was pleasant to
find that the American type from Utah was the same as from Ohio or
Massachusetts; with all our differences we are the most homogeneous
people under the sun, and likest a large family. We all frankly got
tired at about the same time at the same place, and agreed that we had,
without the amphitheatre, had enough when we ended at the Street of
Tombs, where the tombs are in so much better repair than the houses. For
myself, I remembered the amphitheatre so perfectly from 1864 that I did
not see how I could add a single emotion there in 1908 to those I had
already turned into literature; and though Pompeii is but small, the
amphitheatre is practically as far from the Street of Tombs, after you
have walked about the place for two hours, as the Battery is from High
Bridge. There is no Elevated or Subway at Pompeii, and even the lines of
public chariots, if such they were, which left those ruts in the lava
pavements seem to have been permanently suspended after the final
destruction in the year 79.
We were not only very tired, but very hungry, and we asked our guide to
take us back the shortest way. I suggested a cross-cut at one point, and
he caught at the word eagerly, and wrote it in his note-book for future
use. He also acted upon it instantly, and we cut across the back yards
and over the kitchen areas of several absent citizens on our way back.
Our guide was as good and true as it is in the nature of guides to be,
but absolute goodness and truth are rather the attributes of American
travellers; and you will not escape the small graft which the guides are
so rigorously forbidden to practise. Pompeii is no longer in the
keeping of the Italian army; with the Italian instinct of
decentralization the place has claimed the right of self-government, and
now the guides are civilians, and not soldiers, as they were in my far
day. They do not accept fees, but still they take them; and our guide
said that he had a brother-in-law who had the best restaurant outside
the gate, where we could get luncheon for two francs.
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