Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Then the flames and smell of sulphur which gave warning
of the approaching fire drove the others to take flight and
roused [my uncle] to stand up. He stood leaning on two
slaves and then suddenly collapsed.
Finally, the death:
The dense fumes choked his windpipe which was constitu-
tionally weak and narrow and often inflamed. When daylight
returned on the 26th - two days after the last day he had seen
- his body was found intact and uninjured, still fully clothed
and looking more like sleep than death.
In his second letter to Tacitus, Pliny described a further pheno -
menon, the sea drawing back: the first sign, as we now know, of
a great wave or tsunami:
We also saw the sea sucked away and apparently forced back
by the earthquake: at any rate it receded from the shore so
that quantities of sea creatures were left stranded on dry sand.
Ending his second letter to Tacitus, Pliny the Younger described
the aftermath of the eruption:
At last the darkness thinned and dispersed into smoke or
cloud; then there was genuine daylight, and the sun actually
shone out, but yellowish as it is during an eclipse. We were
terrified to see everything changed, buried deep in ashes like
snowdrifts.³
This is as precise and as particular a description of the event
as any we could wish for now. It is pre-scientific, as well as scien-
tific, and relies on observation without the complication of
too much knowledge. Pliny's letters, discovered in the sixteenth
century, give an extraordinarily clear account of the chronology of
a Vesuvian eruption, and came to form a convenient basis for
later accounts and writing, in particular Edward Bulwer Lytton's
