Эндрю Тэйлор – God’s Fugitive (страница 10)
Upon some unhappy persons who approached there fell a spattered fiery shower of volcanic powder, which in that fearful moment burned through their clothing and, scorched to death, they lived hardly an hour after. A young man was circumvented and swallowed up in torments by the pursuing foot of lava, whose current was very soon as large as the Thames at London Bridge …
The account is an impressive
His fascination is clear: it overcomes any attempt at scientific detachment. And yet there is something disquieting about the writing – something beyond either his infectious enthusiasm or his undoubted physical courage. For all the perfunctory sympathy of his expressions, there is a gloating quality about the way he dwells on the ‘spattered fiery shower’ and its terrible effects; his attitude towards the suffering and dying tourists seems disturbingly cold, almost like a biologist focusing his microscope on the death-throes of a beetle. Not for the first time or the last, the need of the shy, retiring man to keep his distance had left his emotional responses seeming suspect, his human sympathy oddly lacking.
The eruption continued through the day, with the whole region plunged into darkness by the clouds of smoke and ashes that were hurled some four or five thousand feet into the air. By now, any gleeful anticipation of a minor tourist boom in the surrounding towns was forgotten. The prospect of further eruptions had brought panic to the local people, and on the volcano itself the scene was even more frightening. ‘It seemed completely perforated, and the lava oozed, as it were, through its whole surface. I cannot better express this phenomenon than by saying that Vesuvius
That Doughty’s diaries, for all the detail of his later description, make no mention of the eruption might lead cynics to doubt whether he had ever been on the mountain at all. But among the collection of Doughty memorabilia at Caius College, Cambridge, is a small sealed glass phial containing a few grams of a light grey powder. A carefully written label on the side reveals the contents to be ‘Vesuvius Ashes – Ashes which fell on us in descending 28 April 1872, 3 a.m.’. If his own account is to be believed – and there is no reason why it should not be – he had spent the best part of twenty-four hours on the slopes of a volcano as it erupted beneath him.
His diary is silent, too, about the scenes of devastation which he must have witnessed over the next few days. The worst of the eruptions ended on 1 May, the day Doughty set off for Castagneto, but the lava flows had by then engulfed several settlements on the western slopes of the mountain. Fields, gardens and houses were buried under a flood of molten rock, and whole villages laid waste. If human disaster on this scale troubled or even interested him, he said nothing.
Fifty years later, as he worked on a new edition of
Flowed down an horrid molten-footed flood –
Inevitable creeping lava-tide,
That licketh all up, before his withering course.
Nor builded work, nor rampire cast in haste
Of thousand men’s hands might, and they were helped
Of unborn Angels, suffice to hold back
That devastating, soulless, impious march
Of molten dross … 10
As an old man, he can look back, too, on the suffering of the local people, leaping in a panic from ‘tottering bedsteads’ to watch the eruption.
Men gaze on, with cold and fainting hearts,
Folding their hands, with trembling lips, to Heaven;
Not few lament their toilful years undone –
Those fields o’erwhelmed, wherein their livelihood.
Others inquire, if this were that last fire
Divine, whose wrath, is writ, should end the world?11
A couple of years from the end of his life, he looked back in horror and awe at what he had seen; for now, though, he was silent.
As a geologist, Doughty must have found the eruption fascinating – fascinating enough to risk his life clambering up the trembling mountainside to observe it – and yet, in the record of his journey, it is completely ignored. Four months later, indeed, he inspected the nearby ruins of Pompeii, scene of an earlier and even more disastrous eruption, and then made a second expedition up the now dormant volcano. This time he climbed during the day, taking his leisure to study and make notes on the crater – ‘immense and terrific gulf, horridly rent’ – and also on the smaller vents left behind by another eruption four years earlier. ‘These have the appearance of antiquity, though of but few years,’ notes Doughty the geologist and scientific observer – and he then adds, with a calm and chilling detachment: ‘Found there a quantity of wild figs and refreshed myself with them. On foot to the Torre del Greco, and returned by railway to Pompeii.’
Clearly, Doughty’s preoccupations were not those of an ordinary traveller: his diary treats the eruption of Vesuvius with the same lack of interest as it does the political cataclysm in France. Indeed, it is hard to find anything in the countries through which he passed in these early months of his travels that truly awakened his enthusiasm. With him, though, he had several cases of books and, on the roads of southern Europe as much as in the calmer atmosphere of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, it was his studies that preoccupied him.
When the diary resumes on 1 May, after its eventful break, it is to record that Doughty is moving on from Naples to the nearby resort of Castagneto, and another small guesthouse. ‘A worthy family – good entertainment,’ he notes – and, more importantly, a place where he could be alone with his books.
In his manner, he was still the archetypal crusty English gentleman abroad, complaining in his diary and no doubt to his host about the water, the weather and the scenery – but it was agreeable enough for him to spend some four months there, concentrating on his books and enjoying the home comforts of the lodging house. He left a case and a portmanteau of books with his landlord, Signor Cavalieri, and his family, to be picked up on his way home – which, he now suggested for the first time, might be after another two or three years.
It marks a significant change in his travelling: Castagneto is the last place at which the diary mentions either books or studies until Doughty embarked on his Arabic lessons in Damascus three years later. Whatever his plans had been when he left England, from now on he devoted more time to the places he was visiting, and to the various languages with which he came into contact. The focus of his attention had shifted. For the rest of his travels he is more gypsy – his own word – than travelling scholar, more an observer of the world around him than a student poring over his books.
From Castagneto he returned to Vesuvius, presumably to see the after-effects of the eruption, and then, after a couple of days’ wanderings among the ruins of Pompeii, he took the ferry to Sicily. It was an evening journey, the sea calm, ‘the night starry but vaporous, the eye looking … into a depth or thickness of stars …’ Alone on the deck, as the ferry left its luminous trail across the dark sea, he could relax.
It was, predictably, not the people of Sicily who had attracted him – ‘the lower sort dull, unintelligent, and half savage manners’ – but the volcano. After his experiences on Vesuvius, Doughty wanted to see Etna, which was also rumbling ominously.
It was a starry, moonlit night, with a chill wind blowing clouds of smoke down from the volcano upon Doughty and his guide as they struggled up towards the crater, their breath catching with the reek of sulphur. For someone who had already witnessed the flaming rocks and molten lava of Vesuvius, it must have been a terrifying experience. There were occasional muffled explosions deep within the mountain, and sudden belches of smoke and gas from the summit, while a layer of new-fallen sand which covered everything around the crater seemed to suggest that a new eruption was imminent – but the same detachment which left Doughty immune to the beauty of many of the places through which he passed quashed any fear for his own safety, leaving him as calm and aloof as if he had been in a laboratory, rather than on the summit of a rumbling volcano.
Edge of crater a soft, moist mould, wet with sulphurous vapours which rise everywhere. Saw no yellow colour, or gathering of sulphur, but everywhere the like brown mould; the walls of the crater of the same – no ribs of rocks, nor horrible rendings as at present in Vesuvius, but terraced and easy to be descended into on a cord …