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The innocents abroad, or, The new pilgrims' progress (1911)
The innocents abroad or The new pilgrims' progress - 1911 Author:Mark Twain Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV THE BURIED CITY OF POMPEII THEY pronounce it Pom-pay-e. I always had an idea that you went down into Pompeii with torches, by the way of damp, d... more »ark stairways, just as you do in silver-mines, and traversed gloomy tunnels with lava overhead and something on either hand like dilapidated prisons gouged out of the solid earth, that faintly resembled houses. But you do nothing of the kind. Fully one-half of the buried city, perhaps, is completely exhumed and thrown open freely to the light of day; and there stand the long rows of solidly built brick houses (roofless) just as they stood eighteen hundred years ago, hot with the flaming sun; and there lie their floors, clean-swept, and not a bright fragment tarnished or wanting of the labored mosaics that pictured them with the beasts and birds and flowers which we copy in perishable carpets to-day; and there are the Venuses and Bacchuses and Adonises, making love and getting drunk in many-hued frescoes on the walls of saloon and bedchamber; and there are the narrow streets and narrower sidewalks, paved with flags of good hard lava, the one deeply rutted with the chariot-wheels, and the other with the passing feet of the Pompeiians of bygone centuries; and there are the bake shops, the temples, the halls of justice, the baths, the theaters—all clean-scraped and neat, and suggesting nothing of the nature of a silver-mine away down in the bowels of the earth. The broken pillars lying about, the doorless doorways, and the crumbled tops of the wilderness of walls, were wonderfully suggestive of the "burnt district" in one of our cities, and if there had been any charred timbers, shattered windows, heaps of debris, and general blackness and smokiness about the place, the resemblance would have been perfect. But no—the sun shine...« less