Pompeii

wagons and collected a torch. He returned and thrust it into the flames. It ignited immediately. The three of them gathered around the opening in the earth and once again he caught the whiff of sulphur rising from the darkness. 'Fetch me some rope,' he said to Musa. 'It's with the tools.' He glanced at Corvinus. 'And how did it go with you? Did you close the sluices?'
    'Yes, aquarius. We had to argue with the priest but Becco convinced him.'
    'What time did you shut it off?'
    'The seventh hour.'
    Attilius massaged his temples, trying to work it out. The level of water in the flooded tunnel would start to drop in a couple of hours. But unless he sent Corvinus back to Abellinum almost immediately, Becco would follow his instruction, wait twelve hours, and reopen the sluices during the sixth watch of the night. It was all desperately tight. They would never manage it.
    When Musa came back Attilius handed him the torch. He tied one end of the rope around his waist and sat on the edge of the open manhole. He muttered, 'Theseus in the labyrinth.'
    'What?'
    'Never mind. Just make sure you don't let go of the other end, there's a good fellow.'
    Three feet of earth, thought Attilius, then two of masonry and then six of nothing from the top of the tunnel roof to the floor. Eleven feet in all. I had better land well. He turned and lowered himself into the narrow shaft, his fingers holding tight to the lip of the manhole, and hung there for a moment, suspended. How many times had he done this? And yet never in more than a decade had he lost the sense of panic at finding himself entombed beneath the earth. It was his secret dread, never confessed to anyone, not even to his father. Especially not to his father. He shut his eyes and let himself drop, bending his knees as he landed to absorb the shock. He crouched there for a moment, recovering his balance, the stink of sulphur in his nostrils, then cautiously felt outwards with his hands. The tunnel was only three feet wide. Dry cement beneath his fingers. Darkness when he opened his eyes – as dark as when they were closed. He stood, squeezed himself back a pace and shouted up to Musa, 'Throw down the torch!'
    The flame guttered as it fell and for a moment he feared it had gone out, but when he bent to take the handle it flared again, lighting the walls. The lower part was encrusted with lime deposited by the water over the years. Its roughened, bulging surface looked more like the wall of a cave than anything man-made and he thought how quickly Nature seized back what She had yielded – brickwork was crumbled by rain and frost, roads were buried under green drifts of weeds, aqueducts were clogged by the very water they were built to carry. Civilisation was a relentless war which Man was doomed to lose eventually. He picked at the lime with his thumbnail. Here was another example of Exomnius's idleness. The lime was almost as thick as his finger. It ought to have been scraped back every couple of years. No maintenance work had been done on this stretch for at least a decade.
    He turned awkwardly in the confined space, holding the torch in front of him, and strained his eyes into the darkness. He could see nothing. He began to walk, counting each pace, and when he reached eighteen he gave a murmur of surprise. It was not simply that the tunnel was entirely blocked – he had expected that – but rather it seemed as if the floor had been driven upwards, pushed from below by some irresistible force. The thick concrete bed on which the channel rested had been sheared and a section of it sloped towards the roof. He heard Musa's muffled shout behind him: 'Can you see it?'
    'Yes, I see it!'
    The tunnel narrowed dramatically. He had to get down on his knees and shuffle forwards. The fracturing of the base had, in turn, buckled the walls and collapsed the roof. Water was seeping through a compressed mass of bricks and earth and lumps of concrete. He scraped at it with his free hand, but the stench of sulphur was at its strongest here and the flames of his torch began to dwindle. He backed away quickly, reversing all the way to the shaft of the manhole. Looking up he could just make out the faces of Musa and Corvinus framed by the evening sky. He leaned his torch against the tunnel wall.
    'Hold the rope fast. I'm coming out.' He untied it from around his waist and gave it a sharp pull. The faces of the men had vanished. 'Ready?'
    'Yes!'
    He tried not to think of what might happen if they