The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Innocents Abroad, Part 4 of 6
by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

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Title: The Innocents Abroad, Part 4 of 6

Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Release Date: June 15, 2004 [EBook #5691]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INNOCENTS ABROAD, PART 4 OF 6 ***

Produced by David Widger

INNOCENTS ABROAD

by Mark Twain

[From an 1869--1st Edition]

Part 4.

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE BURIED CITY OF POMPEII

They pronounce it Pom-pay-e. I always had an idea that you went down
into Pompeii with torches, by the way of damp, dark stairways, just as
you do in silver mines, and traversed gloomy tunnels with lava overhead
and something on either hand like dilapidated prisons gouged out of the
solid earth, that faintly resembled houses. But you do nothing the kind.
Fully one-half of the buried city, perhaps, is completely exhumed and
thrown open freely to the light of day; and there stand the long rows of
solidly-built brick houses (roofless) just as they stood eighteen hundred
years ago, hot with the flaming sun; and there lie their floors,
clean-swept, and not a bright fragment tarnished or waiting of the
labored mosaics that pictured them with the beasts, and birds, and
flowers which we copy in perishable carpets to-day; and here are the
Venuses, and Bacchuses, and Adonises, making love and getting drunk in
many-hued frescoes on the walls of saloon and bed-chamber; and there are
the narrow streets and narrower sidewalks, paved with flags of good hard
lava, the one deeply rutted with the chariot-wheels, and the other with
the passing feet of the Pompeiians of by-gone centuries; and there are
the bake-shops, the temples, the halls of justice, the baths, the
theatres--all clean-scraped and neat, and suggesting nothing of the
nature of a silver mine away down in the bowels of the earth. The
broken pillars lying about, the doorless doorways and the crumbled tops
of the wilderness of walls, were wonderfully suggestive of the "burnt
district" in one of our cities, and if there had been any charred
timbers, shattered windows, heaps of debris,