ESTATE OF POMPEII
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almost successful-effort at permanenc.p., It looked sometimes as
though the Romans here had made all their dreams come true in
terms of convenience, wicked and good alike. Vesuvius had long since
destroyed Pompeii's old inhabitants, but there seemed an immortality
about the conveniences, which was a disturbing thought.
"Pompeii may have been beautifully proportioned, but it was
not, so far as I know, a town singular in its era for any remarkable
nobility of conception," he said. "On the other hand-"
"If
you compare it with Bumble, Saskatchewan-"
"But what seems most remarkable to me is that no one has at–
tempted to draw a moral from this relative survival of Pompeii,
when so much breath has been wasted on the divine judgment of
its destruction. Of the two the survival seems the more sinister. . . .
Compared with St. Malo or parts of Rotterdam it's a triumph. In
fact along-side of what's left of Naples it seems to me to have a
positive civic grace."
The Junipers that died of fear.... Ruins, ruins, ruins–
-The first night they arrived in Naples they had taken a cab
and driven for an hour behind the sidestepping horse along the
promenade. What was left of this great city of stupendous history
where Virgil had written the Aeneid and which was once the extreme
point of the Greek world? No doubt much had survived. Yet to
him it had appeared, where it was not simply a heap of grey rubble,
like a second rate seaside resort, with ugly soulless buildings and
mediocre swimming, on the northwest coast of England. Surely, he'd
thought, as he held Tansy's hand in the clopping and sideslipping
cab, he could invest it with more excitement than that for her.
That night they wandered through the incredible steep dark
back streets of the Neapolitan slums, past the shrines, the niches,
the children setting up Catherine wheels, up the long smelly wonder–
ful stairways between houses, past the bedsteads set right on the
street, the sailors lurchingly carrying the girls' bags-the Rembrandt
supper at Emmaeus round every corner. From a high top window
of a narrow tall building a basket was lowered, little by little, and
at the bottom filled with wine, and bread and fruit, and, jerkingly,
withdrawn. And that was what travel was supposed to be, thought
Roderick, like that basket that is lowered down into the past, and is
brought back again, safely through one's window, filled with the
