Pompeii

the sky. Obviously it had been a young woman's room: abandoned jewellery, a comb, a broken mirror. In the filthy half-light, a doll, partly buried in the remains of the roof, looked grotesquely like a dead child. He lifted what he thought was a blanket from the bed and saw that it was a cloak. He tried the door – locked – then sat on the bed and examined the cloak more closely.
    He had never had much of an eye for what women wore. Sabina used to say that she could have dressed in rags and he would never have noticed. But this, he was sure, was Corelia's. Popidius had said she had been locked in her room and this was a woman's bedroom. There was no sign of a body, either here or outside. For the first time he dared to hope she had escaped. But when? And to where?
    He turned the cloak over in his hands and tried to think what Ampliatus would have done. 'He wanted to imprison us all' – Popidius's phrase. Presumably he had blocked all the exits and ordered everyone to sit it out. But there must have come a moment, towards evening, as the roofs began to collapse, when even Ampliatus would have recognised that the old house was a death-trap. He was not the type to wait around and die without a fight. He would not have fled the city, though: that would not have been in character, and besides, by then it would have been impossible to travel very far. No: he would have tried to lead his family to a safe location.
    Attilius raised Corelia's cloak to his face and inhaled her scent. Perhaps she would have tried to get away from her father. She hated him enough. But he would never have let her go. He imagined they must have organised a procession, very like the one from Pomponianus's villa at Stabiae. Pillows or blankets tied around their heads. Torches to provide a little light. Out into the hail of rock. And then – where? Where was safe? He tried to think as an engineer. What kind of roof was strong enough to withstand the stresses imposed by eight feet of pumice? Nothing flat, that was for sure. Something built with modern methods. A dome would be ideal. But where was there a modern dome in Pompeii?
    He dropped the cloak and stumbled back on to the balcony.

    Hundreds of people were out in the streets now, milling around at roof-level in the semi-darkness, like ants whose nest had been kicked to pieces. Some were aimless – lost, bewildered, demented with grief. He saw a man calmly removing his clothes and folding them as if preparing for a swim. Others appeared purposeful, pursuing their own private schemes of search or escape. Thieves – or perhaps they were the rightful owners: who could tell any more? – darted into the alleyways with whatever they could carry. Worst of all were the names called plaintively in the darkness. Had anyone seen Felicio or Pherusa, or Verus, or Appuleia – the wife of Narcissus? – or Specula or the lawyer Terentius Neo? Parents had become separated from their children. Children stood screaming outside the ruins of houses. Torches flared towards Attilius in the hope that he might be someone else – a father, a husband, a brother. He waved them away, shrugging off their questions, intent on counting off the city blocks as he passed them, climbing the hill north towards the Vesuvius Gate – one, two, three: each seemed to take an age to come to an end and all he could hope was that his memory had not let him down.
    At least a hundred fires were burning on the south side of the mountain, spread out in a complex constellation, hanging low in the sky. Attilius had learned to distinguish between Vesuvius's flames. These ones were safe: the after-effects of a trauma that had passed. It was the prospect of another incandescent cloud appearing above them on the crest of the mountain that filled him with dread and made him push his aching legs beyond the point of exhaustion as he waded through the shattered city.
    At the corner of the fourth block he found the row of shops, three-quarters buried, and scrambled up the slope of pumice on to the low roof. He crouched just behind the ridge. Its outline was sharp. There must be fires beyond it. Slowly he raised his head. Across the flat surface of the buried builder's yard were the nine high windows of Ampliatus's baths, each one brilliantly – defiantly – lit by torches and by scores of oil-lamps. He could see some of the painted gods on the far walls and the figures of men moving in front of them. All that was lacking was music: then it