[Illustration: The Rubbish Trucks Going up Empty.]

We have just glanced over the history of Pompeii before and after its
destruction. Let us now enter the city. But a word of caution before we
start. Do not expect to find houses or monuments still erect and roofed
in like the Pantheon at Rome and the square building at Nismes, or you
will be sadly disappointed. Rather picture to yourself a small city of
low buildings and narrow streets that had been completely burned down in
a single night. You have come to look at it on the day after the
conflagration. The upper stories have disappeared, and the ceilings have
fallen in. Everything that was of wood, planks, and beams, is in ashes;
all is uncovered, and no roofs are to be seen. In these structures,
which in other days were either private dwellings or public edifices,
you now can everywhere walk under the open sky. Were a shower to come
on, you would not know where to seek shelter. It is as though you were
in a city in progress of building, with only the first stories as yet
completed, but without the flooring for the second. Here is a house:
nothing remains of it but the lower walls, with nothing resting on them.
At a distance you would suppose it to be a collection of screens set up
for parlor theatricals. Here is a public square: you will now see in it
only bottom platforms, supports that hold up nothing, shafts of columns
without galleries, pedestals without statues, mute blocks of stone,
space and emptiness. I will lead you into more than one temple. You will
see there only an eminence of masonry, side and end walls, but no front,
no portico. Where is art? Where is the presiding deity of the place? The
ruins of your stable would not be more naked a thousand years hence.
Stones on all sides, tufa, bricks, lava, here and there some slabs of
marble and travertine, then traces of destruction--paintings defaced,
pavements disjointed and full of gaps and cracks--and then marks of
spoliation, for all the precious objects found were carried off to the