lions' heads were painted yellow.
You can see a table much like this in the garden pictured later.]

VESUVIUS

So a living city was buried in a few hours. Wooded hills and green
fields lay covered under great ash heaps. Ever since that terrible
eruption Vesuvius has been restless. Sometimes she has been quiet for
a hundred years or more and men have almost forgotten that she ever
thundered and spouted and buried cities. But all at once she would move
again. She would shoot steam and ashes into the sky. At night fire
would leap out of her top. A few times she sent out dust and lava and
destroyed houses and fields. A man who lived five hundred years after
Pompeii was destroyed described Vesuvius as she was in his time. He
said:

"This mountain is steep and thick with woods below. Above, it is very
craggy and wild. At the top is a deep cave. It seems to reach the bottom
of the mountain. If you peep in you can see fire. But this ordinarily
keeps in and does not trouble the people. But sometimes the mountain
bellows like an ox. Soon after it casts out huge masses of cinders. If
these catch a man, he hath no way to save his life. If they fall upon
houses, the roofs are crushed by the weight. If the wind blow stiff,
the ashes rise out of sight and are carried to far countries. But this
bellowing comes only every hundred years or thereabout. And the air
around the mountain is pure. None is more healthy. Physicians send
thither sick men to get well."

The ashes that had covered Pompeii changed to rich soil. Green vines
and shrubs and trees sprang up and covered it, and flowers made it gay.
Therefore people said to themselves:

"After all, she is a good old mountain. There will never be another
eruption while we are alive."

So villages grew up around her feet. Farmers came and built little
houses and planted crops and were happy working the fertile soil. They
did not dream that they were living above a buried city, that the roots
of their vines sucked water from an old Roman house, that buried statues
lay gazing up toward them as they worked.

About three hundred years ago came another terrible eruption. Again
there were earthquakes. Again the mountain bellowed. Again black clouds
turned day into night. Lightning flashed from cloud to cloud. Tempests
of hot rain fell. The sea rushed back and forth on the shore. The whole
top of the mountain was blown out or sank into the melting pot. Seven
rivers of red-hot lava