The Senator often uses a
political reference to carry him over a delicate allusion. Flowering
shrubs and bushes lined the path we climbed, silent in the sunshine,
dustily decorative, and at the top the turning of a key let us into a
strange place. Always a strange place, however often the guide-books
beat their iterations upon it, a place that leaps at imagination,
peering into other days through the mists that lie between, and blinds
it with a rush of light--the place where they have gathered together
what was left of the dead Pompeiians and their world. There they lay
before us for our wonderment as they ran, and tripped, and struggled,
and fell in the night of that day when they and the gods together were
overwhelmed, and they died as they thought in the end of time. And
through an open door Vesuvius sent up its eternal gentle woolly curl
again the daylight sky, and vineyards throve, and birds sang, and we,
who had survived the gods, came curious to look. The figures lay in
glass cases, and Dicky remarked, with unusual seriousness, that it was
like a dead-house.
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