Pompeii

did not know he still possessed came flooding back, as if there was was nothing left of him any more but a breathless sack of remembered impressions.
    He hoisted the folds of his toga and began stepping gingerly across the surface, his feet sinking deep into the mud, which then made a delightful sucking noise each time he lifted them. He heard Gaius shout behind him, 'Be careful, uncle!' but he shook his head, laughing. He kept away from the tracks the others had made: it was more enjoyable to rupture the crust of mud where it was still fresh and just beginning to harden in the warm air. The others followed at a respectful distance.
    What an extraordinary construction it was, he thought, this underground vault, with its pillars each ten times higher than a man! What imagination had first envisioned it, what will and strength had driven it through to construction – and all to store water that had already been carried for sixty miles! He had never had any objection to deifying emperors. 'God is man helping man,' that was his philosophy. The Divine Augustus deserved his place in the pantheon simply for commissioning the Campanian aqueduct and the Piscina Mirabilis. By the time he reached the centre of the reservoir he was breathless with the effort of repeatedly hoisting his feet out of the clinging sediment. He propped himself against a pillar as Gaius came up beside him. But he was glad that he had made the effort. The water-slave had been wise to send for him. This was something to see, right enough: a mystery of Nature had become also a mystery of Man.
    The object in the mud was an amphora used for storing quicklime. It was wedged almost upright, the bottom part buried in the soft bed of the reservoir. A long, thin rope had been attached to its handles and this lay in a tangle around it. The lid, which had been sealed with wax, had been prised off. Scattered, gleaming in the mud, were perhaps a hundred small silver coins.
    'Nothing has been removed, admiral,' said Dromo anxiously. 'I told them to leave it exactly as they found it.'
    Pliny blew out his cheeks. 'How much is in there, Gaius, would you say?'
    His nephew buried both hands into the amphora, cupped them, and showed them to the admiral. They brimmed with silver denarii. 'A fortune, uncle.'
    'And an illegal one, we may be sure. It corrupts the honest mud.' Neither the earthenware vessel nor the rope had much of a coating of sediment, which meant, thought Pliny, that it could not have lain on the reservoir floor for long – a month at most. He glanced up towards the vaulted ceiling. 'Someone must have rowed out,' he said, 'and lowered it over the side.'
    'And then let go of the rope?' Gaius looked at him in wonder. 'But who would have done such a thing? How could he have hoped to retrieve it? No diver could swim down this deep!'
    'True.' Pliny dipped his own hand into the coins and examined them in his plump palm, stroking them apart with his thumb. Vespasian's familiar, scowling profile decorated one side, the sacred implements of the augur occupied the other. The inscription round the edge – IMP CAES VESP AVG COS III – showed that they had been minted during the Emperor's third consulship, eight years earlier. 'Then we must assume that their owner didn't plan to retrieve them by diving, Gaius, but by draining the reservoir. And the only man with the authority to empty the piscina whenever he desired was our missing aquarius, Exomnius.'

Hora quarta

    [10:37 hours]

'Average magma ascent rates obtained in recent studies suggest that magma in the chamber beneath Vesuvius may have started rising at a velocity of > 0.2 metres per second into the conduit of the volcano some four hours before the eruption – that is, at approximately 9 a.m. on the morning of 24 August.'
Burkhard Müller-Ullrich (editor). Dynamics of Volcanism

    The quattuorviri – the Board of Four: the elected magistrates of Pompeii – were meeting in emergency session in the drawing room of Lucius Popidius. The slaves had carried in a chair for each of them, and a small table, around which they sat, mostly silent, arms folded, waiting. Ampliatus, out of deference to the fact that he was not a magistrate, reclined on a couch in the corner, eating a fig, watching them. Through the open door he could see the swimming pool and its silent fountain, and also, in a corner of the tiled garden, a cat playing with a little bird. This ritual of extended death intrigued him. The Egyptians held