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othing continually, so as not to be suffocated. These ashes went, it is said, as far as Africa, or, at all events, to Rome, where they filled the atmosphere and hid the light of day, so that even the Romans said: "The world is overturned; the sun is falling on the earth to bury itself in night, or the earth is rushing up to the sun to be consumed in his eternal fires." "At length," writes Pliny, "the light returned gradually, and the star that sheds it reappeared, but pallid as in an eclipse. The whole scene around us was transformed; the ashes, like a heavy snow, covered everything." This vast shroud was not lifted until in the last century, and the excavations have narrated the catastrophe with an eloquence which even Pliny himself, notwithstanding the resources of his style and the authority of his testimony, could not attain. The terrible exterminator was caught, as it were, in the very act, amid the ruins he had made. These roofless houses, with the height of one story only remaining and leaving their walls open to the sun; these colonnades that no longer supported anything; these temples yawning wide on all sides, without pediment or portico; this silent loneliness; this look of desolation, distress, and nakedness, which looked like ruins on the morrow of some great fire,--all were enough to wring one's heart. But there was still more: there were the skeletons found at every step in this voyage of discovery in the midst of the dead, betraying the anguish and the terror of that last dreadful hour. Six hundred,--perhaps more,--have already been found, each one illustrating some poignant episode of the immense catastrophe in which they were smitten down! [Illustration: Bodies of Pompeians cast in the Ashes.] Recently, in a small street, under heaps of rubbish, the men working on the excavations perceived an empty space, at the bottom of which were some bones. They at once called Signor Fiorelli, who had a bright idea. He caused some plaster to be mixed, and poured it immediately into the hollow, and the same operation was renewed at other points where he thought he saw other similar bones. Afterward, the crust of pumice-stone and hardened ashes which had enveloped, as it were, in a scabbard, this something that they were trying to discover, was carefully lifted off. When these materials had been removed, there appeared four dead bodies. Any one can see them now, in the museum at Naples; nothing could be more s
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