"WHAT I SAW AT POMPEII.'

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 190, 21 November 1910, Page 8

"WHAT I SAW AT POMPEII.'

. A VIVID ACCOUNT. There is an extraordinarily vivid account of a visit to Pompeii in the Children's Encyclopaedia Magazine for September by the editor, Mr. Arthur Mee —a particularly interesting issue, by the way, with a wonderful frontispiece of two squirrels. "I do not think anything will live longer in my mind than this city of a vanished life, a, sight to look upon with doubting eyes even as you walk through its streets and sit down in its houses; but something almost beyond belief when, afterwards, you fill in all that you' have seen of this city which passed out of the world in a night, THE ACTUALITY OP POMPEII. "Here is a city nearly two miles round, with market-places and shops, with gardens and squares and monuments; all so well dug out of the earth that if the tenant of one of these houses were to come back to life, and were set down at one of the three gates of Pompeii he would walk along the old pavement he helped to wear down 2000 years ago, and would walk to his house quite naturally, recognising his old home in some cases, by paintings still fresh at the gate. "He would find the mosaic floor still almost as new ip. many of his rooms; he would find beautifully statues still unbroken; he would find the pipes which brought water to his bath still in their place; he would find the bath still capable of holding water; and he would find things at home in such a condition that no power would make him believe that his home had been, buried in the earth nearly 2000 years. I do not remember anything that I have ever seen and known to be true which is so ham to believe as Pompeii, for here, in a kitchen, is a pan on the fire, resting on the ashes which were boiling water in it when England was a savage land.

AT THE MOMENT OF DOOM. "It is this which makes Pompeii almost too true to be true —the preservation, through all that dread catastrophe, through all these- nineteen centuries, of the very life of the moment when Pompeii heard its doom. "Pompeii is unmatched as something preserved through nearly twenty centuries, preserved in big and in little, so that identity is easy; but Pompeii is unique in the world because it has stamped for ever upon the earth itself the life of a single moment in the dim mists of Time. I mean a moment; not a period, not a day, not even an hour—but a moment, for I have seen the pan boiling on the fire, the loaf of bread half-eaten, the meat being cooked for dinner, the wine still in the bottle, the ink still in the pot, the key still in the door. "I, have been in the cellar where sixteen people hid themselves when the calamity came, where the master of the house was found with the key in hi 9 hand, a slave close behind him with money and valuables; and I have seen the key. I have walked in the courtyard from which they must have fled; have seen the open windows through which the ashes of Vesuvius burst upon them in the cellar; have seen, it may bey the very clothes some of these poor people wore.

NATURE'S CAMERA AND WHAT SHE DTD WITH IT. "But I have seen more than all this, for I have spen the nain on a man's face as he died on that terrible day. There were no cameras to take photographs then, but Nature can do without cameras. "In the ashes where they lay the features of these poor people were pictured as in a photograph; the ashes hardened, so that the likeness was preserved through #ll the centuries; and when these bodies were discovered there came to a man of science a wonderful idea. Removing the bones carefully, he filled tlie space with plaster, making a perfect ima<re of the figure which had lain there, hidden from sight, for more than a thousand years. And here today lies the image of a man in stone, his face wrought with the very pain of <leath, his eyes drawn, his lips stretched, his features stamped with all the agony of the most agonising event in human history. Not the destruetiveness of Vesuvius, and all the weight of the earth for nineteen hundred years, has changed a muscle of this dead man's face."