On
August 24, the last Tuesday that they would live in
their town, the
people of ancient Pompeii awoke to a typical hot summer’s morning.
Four days earlier, a series of small tremors had begun to shake the area, but people
were not very concerned. The region had been subjected to so many
earthquakes over the years that residents had grown accustomed to them.
What
they didn’t know is that the region’s frequent earthquakes had been
caused by nearby Mount Vesuvius. Roman writers had commented on the
mountain’s strange appearance; one had compared it to Mount Etna, an
active volcano in Sicily. A writer named Strabo even concluded that
Vesuvius had once “held craters of fire.” But because Mount Vesuvius
had been dormant, or sleeping, for over eight hundred years, no one
realized that it was a deadly volcano and that the earthquakes were
signs that it was building up pressure.
That
morning, Vesuvius provided a clearer warning that an eruption was
beginning. Between nine and ten o’clock, the volcano shot a small
explosion of tiny ash particles into the air. The ash streamed up and
fell like fine mist on the eastern slope of Vesuvius. A woman named
Rectina who lived at the foot of the volcano was so alarmed that she
quickly sent a letter with a servant to Elder Pliny, the commander of
Roman naval fleet stationed some 18 miles away, urging him to rescue
her....
Copyright © 2005 by James M. Deem. This
excerpt is taken from Bodies from the Ash (Houghton Mifflin,
2005).
