and potatoes. Your strength refreshed, you will scale the sloping
hillock of ashes and rubbish that conceals the ruins from your view; you
will pay your two francs at the office and you will pass the
gate-keeper's turnstile, astonished, as it is, to find itself in such a
place. These formalities once concluded you have nothing more that is
modern to go through unless it be the companionship of a guide in
military uniform who escorts you, in reality to _watch_, you (especially
if you belong to the country of Lord Elgin), but not to mulct you in the
least. Placards in all the known languages forbid you to offer him so
much as an _obolus_. You make your _entrée_, in a word, into the antique
life, and you are as free as a Pompeian.

The first thing one sees is an arcade and such a niche as might serve
for an image of the Madonna; but be reassured, for the niche contains a
Minerva. It is no longer the superstition of our own time that strikes
our gaze. Under the arcade open extensive store-houses that probably
served as a place of deposit for merchandise. You then enter an
ascending paved street, pass by the temple of Venus and the Basilica,
and arrive at the Forum. There, one should pause.

At first glance, the observer distinguishes nothing but a long square
space closed at the further extremity by a regular-shaped mound rising
between two arcades; lateral alleys extend lengthwise on the right and
the left between shafts of columns and dilapidated architectural
work. Here and there some compound masses of stone-work indicate altars
or the pedestals of statues no longer seen. Vesuvius, still threatening,
smokes away at the extremity of the picture.

[Illustration: Plan of Vesuvius.]