Pompeii

A death more drawn-out and ingenious than anything Man had ever devised in the arena? So much for Pliny's belief that Nature was a merciful deity!
    He tugged the pillow from his sweating head and it was as his face was uncovered that he heard someone croaking his name. In the crowded near-darkness he could not make out who it was at first, and even when the man thrust his way towards him he did not recognise him for he seemed to be made of stone, his face chalk-white with dust, his hair raised in spikes, like Medusa's. Only when he spoke his name – 'It's me, Lucius Popidius' – did he realise that it was one of the aediles of Pompeii.
    Attilius seized his arm. 'Corelia? Is she with you?'
    'My mother – she collapsed on the road.' Popidius was weeping. 'I couldn't carry her any longer. I had to leave her.'
    Attilius shook him. 'Where's Corelia?'
    Popidius's eyes were blank holes in the mask of his face. He looked like one of the ancestral effigies on the wall of his house. He swallowed hard.
    'You coward,' said Attilius.
    'I tried to bring her,' whined Popidius. 'But that madman had locked her in her room.'
    'So you abandoned her?'
    'What else could I do? He wanted to imprison us all!' He clutched at Attilius's tunic. 'Take me with you. That's Pliny over there, isn't it? You've got a ship? For pity's sake – I can't go on alone –'
    Attilius pushed him away and stumbled towards the entrance of the tent. The bonfire had been crushed to extinction by the rain of rocks and now that it had gone out the darkness on the beach was not even the darkness of night but of a closed room. He strained his eyes towards Pompeii. Who was to say that the whole world was not in the process of being destroyed? That the very force which held the universe together – the logos, as the philosophers called it – was not disintegrating? He dropped to his knees and dug his hands into the sand and he knew at that moment, even as the grains squeezed through his fingers, that everything would be annihilated – himself, and Pliny, Corelia, the library at Herculaneum, the fleet, the cities around the bay, the aqueduct, Rome, Caesar, everything that had ever lived or ever been built: everything would eventually be reduced to a shoal of rock and an endlessly pounding sea. None of them would leave so much as a footprint behind them; they would not even leave a memory. He would die here on the beach with the rest and their bones would be crushed to powder.
    But the mountain had not done with them yet. He heard a woman scream and raised his eyes. Faint and miraculous, far in the distance and yet growing in intensity, he saw a corona of fire in the sky.

VENUS

    25 August

    The final day of the eruption

Inclinatio

    [00:12 hours]

'There comes a point when so much magma is being erupted so quickly that the eruption column density becomes too great for stable convection to persist. When this condition prevails, column collapse takes place, generating pyroclastic flows and surges, which are far more lethal than tephra fall.'
Volcanoes: A Planetary Perspective

    The light travelled slowly downwards from right to left. A sickle of luminous cloud – that was how Pliny described it – a sickle of luminous cloud sweeping down the western slope of Vesuvius leaving in its wake a patchwork of fires. Some were winking, isolated pinpricks – farmhouses and villas that had been set alight. But elsewhere whole swathes of the forest were blazing. Vivid, leaping sheets of red and orange flame tore jagged holes in the darkness. The scythe moved on, implacably, for at least as long as it would have taken to count to a hundred, flared briefly, and vanished.
    'The manifestation,' dictated Pliny, 'has moved into a different phase.'
    To Attilius, there was something indefinably sinister about that silent, moving crest – its mysterious appearance, its enigmatic death. Born in the ruptured summit of the mountain it must have rolled away to drown itself in the sea. He remembered the fertile vineyards, the heavy clumps of grapes, the manacled slaves. There would be no vintage this year, ripe or otherwise.
    'It's hard to tell from here,' Torquatus said, 'but judging by its position, I reckon that cloud of flame may just have passed over Herculaneum.'
    'And yet it doesn't seem to be on fire,' replied Attilius. 'That part of the coast looks entirely dark. It's as if the town has vanished –'
    They looked towards the base of the burning mountain, searching for some