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PARTISAN REVIEW
finally the remains of the brothels in Chinatown which, though the
mayor and police force had labored to have them removed right up
to the time of the catastrophe, had nonetheless survived five thousand
nine hundred and ninety-nine generations whereupon it was con–
cluded, probably rightly, that the city was one of the seven wonders
of the world, as it now stood, but wrongly that anything worth–
while had been there in the first place, with the exceptions of the
mountains. The guide had just said too that even the noise of traffic
had been so deafening in Pompeii that during certain hours they'd
had to put a stop to it altogether, as one could well
imagin~
on the
stone paved streets----'God how one must have longed to get away!
And then he remembered that Pompeii was not .a city at all, it was
only a small town, by the, by the-
Roderick had found his book among a collection of old
American
Mercuries
that must have been there since he'd built the house
and started back; but when he came out on his porch he stopped:
the beauty of the scene was phenomenal, terrifying, ominous and
yet oddly reassuring at once. The moon had come out and now it
shone high in a sky of fleece, in which were patches of sky the color
of dark blue serge, twinkling with brilliant stars. The tide was at high
slack, the water so calm and still the whole heavens were reflected
as in a dark mirror. Then he realized that it was not the moonlight
or even the inlet that gave the scene its new, unique beauty, but
precisely the oil refinery itself, or more precisely still, the industrial
counterpoint, the flickering red pyre of the burning oil-waste. Now
over the water (so still he could hear the Wildernesses talking softly
together 200 yards away) came the slow warning bell of a goods'
train chiming on the rail over Port Boden as for a continual vespers,
now closer, now receding, now Byzantine in its timbre, as it vibrated
in the water, now dolorous like Oaxaquefiian
bells,
now a blue
sound, now as it approached, fuller, more globular, then fading, but
always as if some country sound heard long ago that might have
inspired a Wordsworth or Coleridge to describe church bells borne
over the fields to some wandering lovers at evening. But whereas
the moonlight washed the color out of everything replacing it by
luminousness, providing illumination without color, the flaming burn–
ing vermilion oil waste below the moon to the right half way up the
opposite bank made the most extraordinary lurid color, enormously
