found moulded in the ashes, were buried alive, clinging closely to each other, destroyed there by suffocation, or, perhaps, by hunger.  Arrius Diomed had tried to escape alone, abandoning his house and taking with him only one slave, who carried his money-wallet.  He fell, struck down by the stifling gases, in front of his own garden.  How many other poor wretches there were whose last agonies have been disclosed to us!—­the priest of Isis, who, enveloped in flames and unable to escape into the blazing street, cut through two walls with his axe and yielded his last breath at the foot of the third, where he had fallen with fatigue or struck down by the deluge of ashes, but still clutching his weapon.  And the poor dumb brutes, tied so that they could not break away,—­the mule in the bakery, the horses in the tavern of Albinus, the goat of Siricus, which had crouched into the kitchen oven, where it was recently found, with its bell still attached to its neck!  And the prisoners in the blackhole of the gladiators’ barracks, riveted to an iron rack that jammed their legs!  And the two lovers surprised in a shop near the Thermae; both were young, and they were tightly clasped in each other’s arms....  How awful a night and how fearful a morrow!  Day has come, but the darkness remains; not that of a moonless night, but that of a closed room without lamp or candle.  At Misenum, where Pliny the younger, who has described the catastrophe, was stationed, nothing was heard but the voices of children, of men, and of women, calling to each other, seeking each other, recognizing each other by their cries alone, invoking death, bursting out in wails and screams of anguish, and believing that it was the eternal night in which gods and men alike were rushing headlong to annihilation.  Then there fell a shower of ashes so dense that, at the distance of seven leagues from the volcano, one had to shake one’s clothing continually, so as not to be suffocated.  These ashes went, it is said, as far as Africa, or, at all events, to Rome, where they filled the atmosphere and hid the light of day, so that even the Romans said:  “The world is overturned; the sun is falling on the earth to bury itself in night, or the earth is rushing up to the sun to be consumed in his eternal fires.”  “At length,” writes Pliny, “the light returned gradually, and the star that sheds it reappeared, but pallid as in an eclipse.  The whole scene around us was transformed; the ashes, like a heavy snow, covered everything.”

This vast shroud was not lifted until in the last century, and the excavations have narrated the catastrophe with an eloquence which even Pliny himself, notwithstanding the resources of his style and the authority of his testimony, could not attain.  The terrible exterminator was caught, as it were, in the very act, amid the ruins he had made.  These roofless houses, with the height of one story only remaining and leaving their walls open to the sun; these colonnades that no longer