ilver coins and sixty-nine
pieces of gold. A third victim was also on his back; and, singular fact,
they all died looking toward Vesuvius!

A female holding a child in her arms had taken shelter in a tomb which
the volcano shut tight upon her; a soldier, faithful to duty, had
remained erect at his post before the Herculaneum gate, one hand upon
his mouth and the other on his spear. In this brave attitude he
perished. The family of Diomed had assembled in his cellar, where
seventeen victims, women, children, and the young girl whose throat was
found moulded in the ashes, were buried alive, clinging closely to each
other, destroyed there by suffocation, or, perhaps, by hunger. Arrius
Diomed had tried to escape alone, abandoning his house and taking with
him only one slave, who carried his money-wallet. He fell, struck down
by the stifling gases, in front of his own garden. How many other poor
wretches there were whose last agonies have been disclosed to us!--the
priest of Isis, who, enveloped in flames and unable to escape into the
blazing street, cut through two walls with his axe and yielded his last
breath at the foot of the third, where he had fallen with fatigue or
struck down by the deluge of ashes, but still clutching his weapon. And
the poor dumb brutes, tied so that they could not break away,--the mule
in the bakery, the horses in the tavern of Albinus, the goat of Siricus,
which had crouched into the kitchen oven, where it was recently found,
with its bell still attached to its neck! And the prisoners in the
blackhole of the gladiators' barracks, riveted to an iron rack that
jammed their legs! And the two lovers surprised in a shop near the
Thermae; both were young, and they were tightly clasped in each other's
arms.... How awful a night and how fearful a morrow! Day has come, but
the darkness remains; not that of a moonless night, but that of a closed
room without lamp or candle. At Misenum, where Pliny the younger, who
has described the catastrophe, was stationed, nothing was heard but the
voices of children, of men, and of women, calling to each other, seeking
each other, recognizing each other by their cries alone, invoking death,
bursting out in wails and screams of anguish, and believing that it was
the eternal night in which gods and men alike were rushing headlong to
annihilation. Then there fell a shower of ashes so dense that, at the
distance of seven leagues from the volcano, one had to shake one's
cl