Vesuvius: Mountain of Spirits

We have returned to the town of Pompeii at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. This is one of the most amazing places in the world because on an ordinary October day in 79 A.D. the mountain which had provided fertile soil, beautiful views and a rich source of income for this trading town suddenly erupted. This catastrophe caught the sleepy town completely by surprise. The mountain had erupted in the past, but the most recent activity had occurred 800 years before. Although there had been prehistoric settlements here thousands of years before, that eruption drove away the Greek traders who had settled here at that time. In 79 AD people had been living at this site for only 600 years. They had no idea that Vesuvius was anything more than an ordinary mountain.

First came the blast that shot a plume of volcanic ash 120,000 feet into the stratosphere. The effluent was so large that the mountain made its own weather. A few people died from the shock of the heat, but the worst damage was yet to come. The eruption produced lightning and a thunderstorm that caught the volcanic ash and dropped it in hot, muddy raindrops on everything below. A muddy fog was inhaled by every breathing creature. Where the heated raindrops fell they thickened and eventually hardened, encasing everyone and everything they covered in a shell of hot concrete. Most of the victims of Vesuvius didn’t burn, they suffocated.

A few people escaped. One woman rode a horse to the Roman port authority on the coast several miles north of Herculaneum. She told the captain of the port, a man named Pliny, about the eruption. He tried to help by sending several fast Croatian rescue ships across the bay to Herculaneum. However, the heat and the rain of volcanic ash were so severe that the ships could not reach land to rescue the victims. Port Captain Pliny wrote a report about the eruption of mount Vesuvius and sent it to Rome. His son, Pliny the younger, remembered his father’s account of the events of that horrible day. The son wrote it down in a book which was essentially lost to history until Naples came under the rule of the King of Spain in 1734. A Spanish scholar found Pliny’s account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and this discovery eventually led to the archaeological excavation of this site. Several skeletons and other artifacts had already been found when one of the archaeologists came upon an idea. He knew the bodies down in the volcanic concrete had decomposed, so he reasoned that the must have left a cavity. He filled the cavity with liquid plaster of Paris and let it harden. Then he dug away all of the soil around the dried plaster and he had a perfect cast of the victims on their final seconds of life.

In this way the images of the victims were preserved. So we’re their houses, their mosaics, their ovens, their streets, and their temples. The city is still here. So are its people. Pompeii is a city of spirits.Read more