ESTATE OF POMPEII
195
monitory finger as Roderick seemed about to say something. "All
street symbolic. All anchored east and west, north and south. Except
crooked street, wine street and woman street. . . A man drunk can-a
say, 'I don't know where 1 am. 1 don't-a know where 1 was.' So
streets are straight except for curved, so he can't say 1 don't know
where I was. Si," he said, as now they walked on down the cir–
cumambient Vico dei Lumpanare toward the Strada dell'Abbon–
danza, "So streets are straight except for curved so he can't-a say
1 don't know where 1 was." He shook his head.
Roderick's last memory of Eridanus was of a colossal fire: the
Salinas meekly unloading crude oil at the refinery, innocent rakish
smokestakes aft, and then bang, and up went the wharf, sirens wailing
as though it were suddenly the lunch hour; then the tanker backing
out silently into the inlet, or rather pulling, breaking her mooring
lines, and the flames on the tanker apparently subdued as a mushroom
of smoke went up on its extending columnar stalk a thousand feet
into the air from the refinery: bang, bang, as the oil drums exploded:
the noise of crackling even at a distance of two miles and the huge
hoses visible: bang and the freight train that rushed soundlessly
through the refinery: bang, bang, watching the fire from the
Wildernesses' pier, for it looked like a major and terrifying disaster
to the whole waterfront,
his
knees trembling so hard that he couldn't
hold the binoculars still: bang, and the Salinas now motionless right
opposite, and the fire getting worse, the noise of crackling, roaring,
and the two-toned moaning rockets of sound of sirens, whirring di–
minuendo, and then, after half an hour or so, the arrival of the
magnificent turreted fireboat, neighing like a horse, from the town,
like a urinating dinosaur, a monitor, a medieval but supermodern
fantasy, a creation of Leonardo da Vinci-and the disaster averted–
unless the oil on the ebbing tide should catch fire: and the trellis
work of the oil company pier clearly silhouetted against the smoke
and steam: the planes flying overhead trying to photograph it for
the newspapers: and the Salinas that seemed to have no one aboard
slowly, slowly and silently steaming guiltily down and away to Port
Boden: and then the excitement over, and then
all
afternoon the
maniacal aspect of the sky, the sun like a fiery hub to a gigantic
black-disked wheel tired by a rainbow, and the stink of fried oil
drifting over the water, and in the evening the curious sightseers row-
