Pompeii

road. He blundered into a team of oxen that had become stuck in the drifts and a horse that had collapsed between the shafts of an abandoned wagon, its burden too heavy to pull: a stone horse pulling a stone cart. All these things appeared as brief apparitions in the flickering circle of light he carried. There must have been much more that mercifully he could not see. Sometimes the living as well as the dead emerged fleetingly out of the darkness – a man carrying a cat; a young woman, naked and deranged; another couple carrying a long brass candelabrum slung across their shoulders, the man at the front and the woman at the back. They were heading in the opposite direction to him. From either side came isolated, barely human cries and moans, such as he imagined might be heard on a battlefield after the fighting was done. He did not stop, apart from once, when he heard a child crying out for its parents. He stopped, listening, and stumbled around for a while, trying to find the source of the voice, calling out in response, but the child went quiet, perhaps out of fear at the sound of a stranger, and eventually he gave up the search.
    All this lasted for several hours.
    At some point the crescent of light appeared again at the summit of Vesuvius, sweeping down, following more or less the same trajectory as before. The glow was brighter and when it reached the shore, or what he guessed was the shore, it did not die at once but rolled on out to sea before tapering away into the darkness. It was followed by the same easing in the fall of rock. But this time on the slopes of the mountain it seemed to extinguish the fires rather than rekindle them. Soon afterward his torch began to stutter. Most of the pitch had burned away. He pushed on with a renewed energy born of fear because he knew that when it died he would be left helpless in the darkness. And when that moment came it was indeed terrible – more horrible than he had feared. His legs had vanished and he could see nothing, not even if he brought his hand right up to his eyes.
    The fires on the side of Vesuvius had also dwindled to an occasional tiny fountain of orange sparks. More red lightning gave a pinkish glow to the underside of the black cloud. He was no longer sure in which direction he was facing. He was disembodied, utterly alone, buried almost up to his thighs in stone, the earth whirling and thundering around him. He flung away his extinguished torch and let himself sink forwards. He stretched out his hands and lay there, feeling the mantle of pumice slowly accumulating around his shoulders, and it was peculiarly comforting, like being tucked up in bed at night as a child. He laid his cheek to the warm rock and felt himself relax. A great sense of tranquillity suffused him. If this was death then it was not too bad: he could accept this – welcome it, even, as one might a well-earned rest at the end of a hard day's work out on the arcades of the aqueducts.
    In his dreams the ground was melting and he was dropping, tumbling, in a cascade of rocks, towards the centre of the earth.

    He was woken by heat, and by the smell of burning. He did not know how long he had slept. Long enough to be almost entirely buried. He was in his grave. Panicking, he pushed with his forearms and slowly he felt the weight on his shoulders yield and split, heard the rustle of stones as they tumbled off him. He raised himself and shook his head, spitting the dust from his mouth, blinking his eyes, still buried below the waist.
    The rain of pumice had mostly stopped – the familiar warning-sign – and in the distance, immediately before him, low in the sky, he saw again the familiar scythe of glowing cloud. Except that this time, instead of moving like a comet from right to left, it was descending fast and spreading laterally, coming his way. Immediately behind it was an interval of darkness which sprang into fire a few moments later as the heat found fresh fuel on the southern flank of the mountain; before it, carried on the furnace-wind, came a rolling boom of noise, such that if he had been Pliny he would have varied his metaphor and described it not as a cloud but as a wave – a boiling wave of red-hot vapour that scorched his cheeks and watered his eyes. He could smell his hair singeing.
    He writhed to free himself from the grip of the pumice as the sulphurous dawn raced across the sky towards him. Something dark was growing in the centre of it, rising out of the ground,