ESTATE OF POMPEII
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real, as it were, bad: as the bells continued to chime intetmittently
along the rail, the continual vespers not receding, or drowned by an
occasional mournful whistle .and distant clunking of wheels on iron,
Roderick thought how different Eridanus would look from the refinery
side. What would they see? Nothing at all, perhaps only the oil lamp
in his father-in-Iaw's house and the illumined open windows of the
Wildernesses, nothing else, probably not even the Wildernesses' pier
which looked so magnificent in the moonlight, striking down into
its reflection with its geometrically beautiful cross-braces, just the
shadowy bulk of the forest, and the mountains rising above; they
wouldn't see even the shapes of the shacks, or perhaps that there was
a bay at all; the whole perhaps inseparable from its own shadow.
The Wildernesses' cat debouched itself from his father-in-law's
'house and followed him, bounding up the steps and along the trail,
leading him back to the Wildernesses, stopping for him to catch
up, then leaping on again. Once he stopped to pet the creature which
suddenly seemed to him like some curious aspect or affection of
eternity and for some reason, standing there in the forest, it had
struck him as strange that cats must have looked and behaved exactly
the same in, say, not merely Volney's but Dr. Johnson's day. Mean–
while with his flashlight he sought one of the passages from Volney's
Ruin of Empires
that he'd recalled and wanted to read: "Where are
the ramparts of Nineveh, those walls of Babylon, those palaces of
Persepolis, those temples of Balbec and Jerusalem-" it was absolutely
the most obvious kind of dithyrambic tripe, but considering when it
was written might be, so he felt at that moment anyhow, interesting
in
his
discourse with Wilderness, to compare with Toynbee. "-the
temples are fallen , the palaces overthrown, the ports filled up, the
cities destroyed, and the earth, stripped of its inhabitants, has become
a place of sepulchres. Great God! Whence proceed such fatal revo–
lutions? What causes have so changed the fortunes of those countries?
Wherefore are so many cities destroyed... where are those brilliant
creations of industry...?"
Going through the forest that night with the bounding and
whirling cat all at once it had seemed to him, as if he stood outside
time altogether, that in some way the cities of Volney's had not been
exactly destroyed, that the ancient populations
had
been reproduced
and perpetuated, or rather that the whole damned thing was happen-
