The Wonders of Pompeii | Page 6

followed the line of the streets, which they cleared little by little
before them. In following the streets on the ground-level, the declivity
of ashes and pumice-stone which obstructed them was attacked below,
and thence resulted many regrettable accidents. The whole upper part
of the houses, commencing with the roofs, fell in among the rubbish,
along with a thousand fragile articles, which were broken and lost
without there being any means of determining the point from which

they had been hurled down. In order to obviate this inconvenience,
Signor Fiorelli has started a third system. He does not follow the streets
by the ground-level, but he marks them out over the hillocks, and thus
traces among the trees and cultivated grounds wide squares indicating
the subterranean, islets. No one is ignorant of the fact that these
islets--_isole, insulæ_ in the modern as well as in the ancient language
of Italy--indicate blocks of buildings. The islet traced, Signor Fiorelli
repurchases the land which had been sold by King Ferdinand I. and
gives up the trees found upon it.[A]
"The ground, then, being bought and the vegetation removed, work
begins. The earth at the summit of the hill is taken off and carried away
on a railroad, which descends from the middle of Pompeii by a slope
that saves all expense of machinery and fuel, to a considerable distance
beyond the amphitheatre and the city. In this way, the most serious
question of all, to wit, that of clearing away the dirt, is solved.
Formerly, the ruins were covered in with it, and subsequently it was
heaped up in a huge hillock, but now it helps to construct the very
railroad that carries it away, and will, one day, tip it into the sea.
"Nothing can present a livelier scene than the excavation of these ruins.
Men diligently dig away at the earth, and bevies of young girls run to
and fro without cessation, with baskets in their hands. These are
sprightly peasant damsels collected from the adjacent villages most of
them accustomed to working in factories that have closed or curtailed
operations owing to the invasion of English tissues and the rise of
cotton. No one would have dreamed that free trade and the war in
America would have supplied female hands to work at the ruins of
Pompeii. But all things are linked together now in this great world of
ours, vast as it is. These girls then run backward and forward, filling
their baskets with soil, ashes, and lapillo, hoisting them on their heads,
by the help of the men, with a single quick, sharp motion, and
thereupon setting off again, in groups that incessantly replace each
other, toward the railway, passing and repassing their returning
companions. Very picturesque in their ragged gowns of brilliant colors,
they walk swiftly with lengthy strides, their long skirts defining the
movements of their naked limbs and fluttering in the wind behind them,

while their arms, with gestures like those of classic urn-bearers, sustain
the heavy load that rests upon their heads without making them even
stoop. All this is not out of keeping with the monuments that gradually
appear above the surface as the rubbish is removed. Did not the sight of
foreign visitors here and there disturb the harmony of the scene, one
might readily ask himself, in the midst of this Virgilian landscape, amid
these festooning vines, in full view of the smoking Vesuvius, and
beneath that antique sky, whether all those young girls who come and
go are not the slaves of Pansa, the ædile, or of the duumvir Holconius."
[Illustration: The Rubbish Trucks Going up Empty.]
We have just glanced over the history of Pompeii before and after its
destruction. Let us now enter the city. But a word of caution before we
start. Do not expect to find houses or monuments still erect and roofed
in like the Pantheon at Rome and the square building at Nismes, or you
will be sadly disappointed. Rather picture to yourself a small city of
low buildings and narrow streets that had been completely burned
down in a single night. You have come to look at it on the day after the
conflagration. The upper stories have disappeared, and the ceilings
have fallen in. Everything that was of wood, planks, and beams, is in
ashes; all is uncovered, and no roofs are to be seen. In these structures,
which in other days were either private dwellings or public edifices,
you now can everywhere walk under the open sky. Were a shower to
come on, you would not know where to seek shelter. It is as though you
were in a city in progress of building, with only the first stories as yet
completed, but without the flooring for the second. Here is a