causes would appear to have exercised
a fatal effect on the Pompeians, and but for them nearly all might
have escaped. Thus, the amphitheatre was crowded when the catastrophe
occurred, but only two or three skeletons have been found in it, which
probably were those of gladiators already killed or wounded. The bold,
the prompt, and the energetic saved themselves by immediate flight;
those who lingered through love or avarice, supine indifference, or
palsying fear, perished.

Many sought refuge in the lower rooms or underground cellars of their
houses, but there the steaming mud pursued and overtook them. Had it
been otherwise, they must have died of hunger or suffocation, as all
avenues of egress were absolutely blocked up.

It is impossible to exaggerate the horrors of the last day of the
doomed city. The rumbling of the earth beneath; the dense obscurity
and murky shadow of the heaven above; the long, heavy roll of the
convulsed sea; the strident noise of the vapors and gases escaping
from the mountain-crater; the shifting electric lights, crimson,
emerald green, lurid yellow, azure, blood red, which at intervals
relieved the blackness, only to make it ghastlier than before; the
hot, hissing showers which descended like a rain of fire; the clash
and clang of meeting rocks and riven stones; the burning houses and
flaming vineyards; the hurrying fugitives, with wan faces and
straining eyeballs, calling on those they loved to follow them; the
ashes, and cinders, and boiling mud, driving through the darkened
streets, and pouring into the public places; above all, that fine,
impalpable, but choking dust which entered everywhere, penetrating
even to the lowest cellar, and against which human skill could devise
no effectual protection; all these things must have combined into a
whole of such unusual and such awful terror that the imagination
cannot adequately realize it. The stoutest heart was appalled; the
best-balanced mind lost its composure. The stern Roman soldier stood
rigidly at his post, content to die if discipline required it, but
even his iron nerves quailed at the death and destruction around him.
Many lost their reason, and wandered through the city, gibbering and
shrieking lunatics. And none, we may be sure, who survived the peril,
ever forgot the sights and scenes they had witnessed on that day of
doom.

Three days and nights were thus endured with all the anguish of
suspense and uncertainty. On the fourth