in the distance.]

Several years afterwards, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote to the
younger Pliny and asked him for information about the manner of his
uncle's death. The two letters containing answers to this question are
still extant. Pliny describes how his uncle was suffocated by ashes and
sulphurous vapour on the shore. He had himself seen flames of fire shoot
up out of the crater, which also vomited forth a black cloud spreading
out above like the crown of a pine-tree. He went out with his mother to
the forecourt of the house, but when the ground trembled and the air
became full of ashes they hurried off, followed by a crowd of people.
His mother, who was old, begged him to save himself by rapid flight, but
he would not desert her. And he writes: "I looked round; a thick smoky
darkness rolled threateningly over us from behind; it spread over the
earth like an advancing flood and followed us. 'Let us move to one side
while we can see,' I said,' so that we may not fall down on the road and
be trampled down in the darkness by those behind.' We had scarcely got
out of the crowd when we were involved in darkness, not such as when
there is no moon or the sky is overcast, but such as prevails in a
closed room when the lights are out." And he tells how the fugitives
tied cushions over their heads so as not to be bruised by falling
stones, and how they had repeatedly to shake off the ashes lest they
should be weighed down by them. He was quite composed himself, and
thought that the whole world was passing away.

By this eruption Pompeii was buried under a layer of pumice and ashes 20
feet thick. For a long period of years the inhabitants of the
neighbourhood came hither and digged up with their spades one thing or
another, but then Pompeii sank into the night of oblivion and slumbered
under the earth for fifteen hundred years. At last the town was
discovered again, and excavations were commenced. Country houses,
fields, and clumps of mulberry trees had sprung up on the deep bed of
ashes. Not till fifty years ago did modern investigation take Pompeii
seriously in hand, and now more than half the town is laid bare.
Strangers can ride unhindered through the streets, look into the shops
and baths, and admire the fine wall-paintings in the palaces of the
great. The columns of Jupiter's temple, so long buried in complete
darkness, are again lighted by the sun, and cast their shadows as of old
over the stone flags of the Forum