“Have you read the ‘Last Days of Pompeii?’” the guide amazed us by saying when we had wandered in his wake for an hour.
We had a copy with us and showed it to him. He believed it to be an Italian work, it presently appeared, having read it in that language, _sans_ preface, we suppose, for he also accepted it as sober, veracious history. We allowed ourselves to share his delusion in beholding the plot of ground—a sheet would have covered it—in which Nydia tended the flowers of Glaucus; the shrine of the Penates at the back of the peristyle; the _triclinum_—or banqueting-room in which the young Greek supped with Lepidus, Pansa, Sallust, Clodius and his _umbra_; where the slave-carver “performed that office upon the Ambracian kid to the sound of music, his knife keeping time, beginning with a low tenor, and accomplishing the arduous feat amidst a magnificent diapason.”
The apartment is, like the others, small but well-proportioned, and the frescoes are still quite distinct. We allotted places to the host and his several guests about an imaginary table, the guide smiling at our animated interest without a misgiving that the _dramatis personæ_ were dream-children of Signore Bulwer’s brain. I dare not attempt his Italianization of the noble author’s title. Workmen were repairing the step by which we left the inner court for the _tablium_, or master’s office. An accident had shivered the marble sheathing and several bits were cast aside as worthless. With the guide’s sanction, I pocketed them, and afterward had them made into dainty little salvers, purely clear as the finest Parian, or the enamored Glaucus’ ideal of Ione—“that nymph-like beauty which for months had shone down upon the waters of his memory.”
The silence that has its home in the deserted city is something to dream of,—not describe. The town is swept and clean—doubtless cleaner than when the gargoyles on the fountains at every other corner gushed with fresh winter. That the Pompeians were a thirsty race, water- as well as wine-bibbers,—is distinctly proved by the hollows worn in the stone sides of these enclosed hydrants, just where a man would rest his hand and lean his whole weight to swing his body around in order to bring his lips in contact with the stream from the carved spout. No. 27 showed us how it was done and by the simple action made stillness and solitude more profound. Thousands of swarthy hands—the callous palms of laborer and peasant,—must have rested thus for hundreds of years to produce such abrasion of the solid stone. And here were he and five pale-faced strangers,—the only living things in sight in a street of yawning shop-fronts, built in compact blocks; to the right a grove of columns and expanse of tessellated flooring—the Temple of Justice, to which none now resorted, to which none would ever come again for redress or penalty, while Time endures. Wherever the eye fell were temples of deities whose names live only in mythology and in song, the shrines and fanes of a dead Religion. This was the strangest sight of all;—in this professedly Christian land, temples and altars with the traces of slain and bloodless sacrifices that had smoked upon them, to Mercury and Jupiter and Venus. There was the temple of Isis—whose statue we saw, subsequently, in the Neapolitan Museum,—with the chamber where the priests held their foul orgies, and the secret passage by which they reached the speaking-tube concealed in the body of the goddess; and the room in which Calenus and Burbo were found. An earthquake may have overthrown upper chambers and toppled down images but yesterday. Yet it is a city in which there is not the sign of a cross, or other token that Christ was born and died; whose last inhabitants and worshippers ate, drank, married and were given in marriage in the name of Juno, while He walked the earth.