The Last Days of Pompeii Part 58

Before him, how serenely slept the starlight on that lovely city! how breathlessly its pillared streets reposed in their security!--how softly rippled the dark-green waves beyond!--how cloudless spread, aloft and blue, the dreaming Campanian skies! Yet this was the last night for the gay Pompeii! the colony of the h.o.a.r Chaldean! the fabled city of Hercules! the delight of the voluptuous Roman! Age after age had rolled, indestructive, unheeded, over its head; and now the last ray quivered on the dial-plate of its doom! The gladiator heard some light steps behind--a group of females were wending homeward from their visit to the amphitheatre. As he turned, his eye was arrested by a strange and sudden apparition. From the summit of Vesuvius, darkly visible at the distance, there shot a pale, meteoric, livid light--it trembled an instant and was gone. And at the same moment that his eye caught it, the voice of one of the youngest of the women broke out hilariously and shrill:--

TRAMP! TRAMP! HOW GAILY THEY GO!

HO, HO! FOR THE MORROW'S MERRY SHOW!

BOOK THE FIFTH

Chapter I

THE DREAM OF ARBACES. A VISITOR AND A WARNING TO THE EGYPTIAN.

THE awful night preceding the fierce joy of the amphitheatre rolled drearily away, and greyly broke forth the dawn of THE LAST DAY OF POMPEII! The air was uncommonly calm and sultry--a thin and dull mist gathered over the valleys and hollows of the broad Campanian fields.

But yet it was remarked in surprise by the early fishermen, that, despite the exceeding stillness of the atmosphere, the waves of the sea were agitated, and seemed, as it were, to run disturbedly back from the sh.o.r.e; while along the blue and stately Sarnus, whose ancient breadth of channel the traveler now vainly seeks to discover, there crept a hoa.r.s.e and sullen murmur, as it glided by the laughing plains and the gaudy villas of the wealthy citizens. Clear above the low mist rose the time-worn towers of the immemorial town, the red-tiled roofs of the bright streets, the solemn columns of many temples, and the statue-crowned portals of the Forum and the Arch of Triumph. Far in the distance, the outline of the circling hills soared above the vapors, and mingled with the changeful hues of the morning sky. The cloud that had so long rested over the crest of Vesuvius had suddenly vanished, and its rugged and haughty brow looked without a frown over the beautiful scenes below.

Despite the earliness of the hour, the gates of the city were already opened. Hors.e.m.e.n upon hors.e.m.e.n, vehicle after vehicle, poured rapidly in; and the voices of numerous pedestrian groups, clad in holiday attire, rose high in joyous and excited merriment; the streets were crowded with citizens and strangers from the populous neighborhood of Pompeii; and noisily--fast--confusedly swept the many streams of life towards the fatal show.

Despite the vast size of the amphitheatre, seemingly so disproportioned to the extent of the city, and formed to include nearly the whole population of Pompeii itself, so great, on extraordinary occasions, was the concourse of strangers from all parts of Campania, that the s.p.a.ce before it was usually crowded for several hours previous to the commencement of the sports, by such persons as were not ent.i.tled by their rank to appointed and special seats. And the intense curiosity which the trial and sentence of two criminals so remarkable had occasioned, increased the crowd on this day to an extent wholly unprecedented.

While the common people, with the lively vehemence of their Campanian blood, were thus pus.h.i.+ng, scrambling, hurrying on--yet, amidst all their eagerness, preserving, as is now the wont with Italians in such meetings, a wonderful order and unquarrelsome good humor, a strange visitor to Arbaces was threading her way to his sequestered mansion. At the sight of her quaint and primaeval garb--of her wild gait and gestures--the pa.s.sengers she encountered touched each other and smiled; but as they caught a glimpse of her countenance, the mirth was hushed at once, for the face was as the face of the dead; and, what with the ghastly features and obsolete robes of the stranger, it seemed as if one long entombed had risen once more amongst the living. In silence and awe each group gave way as she pa.s.sed along, and she soon gained the broad porch of the Egyptian's palace.

The black porter, like the rest of the world, astir at an unusual hour, started as he opened the door to her summons.

The sleep of the Egyptian had been usually profound during the night; but, as the dawn approached, it was disturbed by strange and unquiet dreams, which impressed him the more as they were colored by the peculiar philosophy he embraced.

He thought that he was transported to the bowels of the earth, and that he stood alone in a mighty cavern supported by enormous columns of rough and primaeval rock, lost, as they ascended, in the vastness of a shadow athwart whose eternal darkness no beam of day had ever glanced. And in the s.p.a.ce between these columns were huge wheels, that whirled round and round unceasingly, and with a rus.h.i.+ng and roaring noise. Only to the right and left extremities of the cavern, the s.p.a.ce between the pillars was left bare, and the apertures stretched away into galleries--not wholly dark, but dimly lighted by wandering and erratic fires, that, meteor-like, now crept (as the snake creeps) along the rugged and dank soil; and now leaped fiercely to and fro, darting across the vast gloom in wild gambols--suddenly disappearing, and as suddenly bursting into tenfold brilliancy and power. And while he gazed wonderingly upon the gallery to the left, thin, mist-like, aerial shapes pa.s.sed slowly up; and when they had gained the hall they seemed to rise aloft, and to vanish, as the smoke vanishes, in the measureless ascent.

He turned in fear towards the opposite extremity--and behold! there came swiftly, from the gloom above, similar shadows, which swept hurriedly along the gallery to the right, as if borne involuntarily adown the sides of some invisible stream; and the faces of these spectres were more distinct than those that emerged from the opposite pa.s.sage; and on some was joy, and on others sorrow--some were vivid with expectation and hope, some unutterably dejected by awe and horror. And so they pa.s.sed, swift and constantly on, till the eyes of the gazer grew dizzy and blinded with the whirl of an ever-varying succession of things impelled by a power apparently not their own.

Arbaces turned away, and, in the recess of the hall, he saw the mighty form of a giantess seated upon a pile of skulls, and her hands were busy upon a pale and shadowy woof; and he saw that the woof communicated with the numberless wheels, as if it guided the machinery of their movements.

He thought his feet, by some secret agency, were impelled towards the female, and that he was borne onwards till he stood before her, face to face. The countenance of the giantess was solemn and hushed, and beautifully serene. It was as the face of some colossal sculpture of his own ancestral sphinx. No pa.s.sion--no human emotion, disturbed its brooding and unwrinkled brow: there was neither sadness, nor joy, nor memory, nor hope: it was free from all with which the wild human heart can sympathize. The mystery of mysteries rested on its beauty--it awed, but terrified not: it was the Incarnation of the sublime. And Arbaces felt the voice leave his lips, without an impulse of his own; and the voice asked:

'Who art thou, and what is thy task?'

'I am That which thou hast acknowledged,' answered, without desisting from its work, the mighty phantom. 'My name is NATURE! These are the wheels of the world, and my hand guides them for the life of all things.'

'And what,' said the voice of Arbaces, 'are these galleries, that strangely and fitfully illumined, stretch on either hand into the abyss of gloom?'

'That,' answered the giant-mother, 'which thou beholdest to the left, is the gallery of the Unborn. The shadows that flit onward and upward into the world, are the souls that pa.s.s from the long eternity of being to their destined pilgrimage on earth. That which thou beholdest to thy right, wherein the shadows descending from above sweep on, equally unknown and dim, is the gallery of the Dead!'

'And wherefore, said the voice of Arbaces, 'yon wandering lights, that so wildly break the darkness; but only break, not reveal?'

'Dark fool of the human sciences! dreamer of the stars, and would-be decipherer of the heart and origin of things! those lights are but the glimmerings of such knowledge as is vouchsafed to Nature to work her way, to trace enough of the past and future to give providence to her designs. Judge, then, puppet as thou art, what lights are reserved for thee!'

Arbaces felt himself tremble as he asked again, 'Wherefore am I here?'

'It is the forecast of thy soul--the prescience of thy rus.h.i.+ng doom--the shadow of thy fate lengthening into eternity as declines from earth.'

Ere he could answer, Arbaces felt a rus.h.i.+ng WIND sweep down the cavern, as the winds of a giant G.o.d. Borne aloft from the ground, and whirled on high as a leaf in the storms of autumn, he beheld himself in the midst of the Spectres of the Dead, and hurrying with them along the length of gloom. As in vain and impotent despair he struggled against the impelling power, he thought the WIND grew into something like a shape--a spectral outline of the wings and talons of an eagle, with limbs floating far and indistinctly along the air, and eyes that, alone clearly and vividly seen, glared stonily and remorselessly on his own.

'What art thou?' again said the voice of the Egyptian.

'I am That which thou hast acknowledged'; and the spectre laughed aloud--'and my name is NECESSITY.'

'To what dost thou bear me?'

'To the Unknown.'

'To happiness or to woe?'

'As thou hast sown, so shalt thou reap.'

'Dread thing, not so! If thou art the Ruler of Life, thine are my misdeeds, not mine.'

'I am but the breath of G.o.d!' answered the mighty WIND.

'Then is my wisdom vain!' groaned the dreamer.

'The husbandman accuses not fate, when, having sown thistles, he reaps not corn. Thou hast sown crime, accuse not fate if thou reapest not the harvest of virtue.'

The scene suddenly changed. Arbaces was in a place of human bones; and lo! in the midst of them was a skull, and the skull, still retaining its fleshless hollows, a.s.sumed slowly, and in the mysterious confusion of a dream, the face of Apaecides; and forth from the grinning jaws there crept a small worm, and it crawled to the feet of Arbaces. He attempted to stamp on it and crush it; but it became longer and larger with that attempt. It swelled and bloated till it grew into a vast serpent: it coiled itself round the limbs of Arbaces; it crunched his bones; it raised its glaring eyes and poisonous jaws to his face. He writhed in vain; he withered--he gasped--beneath the influence of the blighting breath--he felt himself blasted into death. And then a voice came from the reptile, which still bore the face of Apaecides and rang in his reeling ear:

'THY VICTIM IS THY JUDGE! THE WORM THOU WOULDST CRUSH BECOMES THE SERPENT THAT DEVOURS THEE!'

With a shriek of wrath, and woe, and despairing resistance, Arbaces awoke--his hair on end--his brow bathed in dew--his eyes glazed and staring--his mighty frame quivering as an infant's, beneath the agony of that dream. He awoke--he collected himself--he blessed the G.o.ds whom he disbelieved, that he was in a dream--he turned his eyes from side to side--he saw the dawning light break through his small but lofty window--he was in the Precincts of Day--he rejoiced--he smiled; his eyes fell, and opposite to him he beheld the ghastly features, the lifeless eye, the livid lip--of the hag of Vesuvius!

'Ha!' he cried, placing his hands before his eyes, as to shut out the grisly vision, 'do I dream still?--Am I with the dead?'

'Mighty Hermes--no! Thou art with one death-like, but not dead.

Recognize thy friend and slave.'

There was a long silence. Slowly the shudders that pa.s.sed over the limbs of the Egyptian chased each other away, faintlier and faintlier dying till he was himself again.

'It was a dream, then,' said he. 'Well--let me dream no more, or the day cannot compensate for the pangs of night. Woman, how camest thou here, and wherefore?'

'I came to warn thee,' answered the sepulchral voice of the saga.

'Warn me! The dream lied not, then? Of what peril?'

'Listen to me. Some evil hangs over this fated city. Fly while it be time. Thou knowest that I hold my home on that mountain beneath which old tradition saith there yet burn the fires of the river of Phlegethon; and in my cavern is a vast abyss, and in that abyss I have of late marked a red and dull stream creep slowly, slowly on; and heard many and mighty sounds hissing and roaring through the gloom. But last night, as I looked thereon, behold the stream was no longer dull, but intensely and fiercely luminous; and while I gazed, the beast that liveth with me, and was cowering by my side, uttered a shrill howl, and fell down and died, and the slaver and froth were round his lips. I crept back to my lair; but I distinctly heard, all the night, the rock shake and tremble; and, though the air was heavy and still, there were the hissing of pent winds, and the grinding as of wheels, beneath the ground. So, when I rose this morning at the very birth of dawn, I looked again down the abyss, and I saw vast fragments of stone borne black and floatingly over the lurid stream; and the stream itself was broader, fiercer, redder than the night before. Then I went forth, and ascended to the summit of the rock: and in that summit there appeared a sudden and vast hollow, which I had never perceived before, from which curled a dim, faint smoke; and the vapor was deathly, and I gasped, and sickened, and nearly died. I returned home. I took my gold and my drugs, and left the habitation of many years; for I remembered the dark Etruscan prophecy which saith, "When the mountain opens, the city shall fall--when the smoke crowns the Hill of the Parched Fields, there shall be woe and weeping in the hearths of the Children of the Sea." Dread master, ere I leave these walls for some more distant dwelling, I come to thee. As thou livest, know I in my heart that the earthquake that sixteen years ago shook this city to its solid base, was but the forerunner of more deadly doom. The walls of Pompeii are built above the fields of the Dead, and the rivers of the sleepless h.e.l.l. Be warned and fly!'

'Witch, I thank thee for thy care of one not ungrateful. On yon table stands a cup of gold; take it, it is thine. I dreamt not that there lived one, out of the priesthood of Isis, who would have saved Arbaces from destruction. The signs thou hast seen in the bed of the extinct volcano,' continued the Egyptian, musingly, 'surely tell of some coming danger to the city; perhaps another earthquake--fiercer than the last.

Be that as it may, there is a new reason for my hastening from these walls. After this day I will prepare my departure. Daughter of Etruria, whither wendest thou?'

'I shall cross over to Herculaneum this day, and, wandering thence along the coast, shall seek out a new home. I am friendless: my two companions, the fox and the snake, are dead. Great Hermes, thou hast promised me twenty additional years of life!'

'Aye,' said the Egyptian, 'I have promised thee. But, woman,' he added, lifting himself upon his arm, and gazing curiously on her face, 'tell me, I pray thee, wherefore thou wishest to live? What sweets dost thou discover in existence?'

'It is not life that is sweet, but death that is awful,' replied the hag, in a sharp, impressive tone, that struck forcibly upon the heart of the vain star-seer. He winced at the truth of the reply; and no longer anxious to retain so uninviting a companion, he said, 'Time wanes; I must prepare for the solemn spectacle of this day. Sister, farewell!