i. But
all things are linked together now in this great world of ours, vast as
it is. These girls then run backward and forward, filling their baskets
with soil, ashes, and _lapillo_, hoisting them on their heads, by the
help of the men, with a single quick, sharp motion, and thereupon
setting off again, in groups that incessantly replace each other, toward
the railway, passing and repassing their returning companions. Very
picturesque in their ragged gowns of brilliant colors, they walk swiftly
with lengthy strides, their long skirts defining the movements of their
naked limbs and fluttering in the wind behind them, while their arms,
with gestures like those of classic urn-bearers, sustain the heavy load
that rests upon their heads without making them even stoop. All this is
not out of keeping with the monuments that gradually appear above the
surface as the rubbish is removed. Did not the sight of foreign
visitors here and there disturb the harmony of the scene, one might
readily ask himself, in the midst of this Virgilian landscape, amid
these festooning vines, in full view of the smoking Vesuvius, and
beneath that antique sky, whether all those young girls who come and go
are not the slaves of Pansa, the aedile, or of the duumvir Holconius."

[Illustration: The Rubbish Trucks Going up Empty.]

We have just glanced over the history of Pompeii before and after its
destruction. Let us now enter the city. But a word of caution before we
start. Do not expect to find houses or monuments still erect and roofed
in like the Pantheon at Rome and the square building at Nismes, or you
will be sadly disappointed. Rather picture to yourself a small city of
low buildings and narrow streets that had been completely burned down in
a single night. You have come to look at it on the day after the
conflagration. The upper stories have disappeared, and the ceilings have
fallen in. Everything that was of wood, planks, and beams, is in ashes;
all is uncovered, and no roofs are to be seen. In these structures,
which in other days were either private dwellings or public edifices,
you now can everywhere walk under the open sky. Were a shower to come
on, you would not know where to seek shelter. It is as though you were
in a city in progress of building, with only the first stories as yet
completed, but without the flooring for the second. Here is a house:
nothing remains of it but the lower walls, with nothing resting on them.
At a distance