The Pirates of Pompeii scroll I :: The Roman Mysteries

The Pirates of Pompeii
Scroll I

The mountain had exploded and for three days darkness covered the land.

When the sun returned at last, it was not the same golden sun which had shone down on the Roman Empire a week before. It was a counterfeit, gleaming dully in a colourless sky above a blasted world.

On a grey hillside ten miles south of the volcano, a dark-skinned slave-girl climbed a path in search of the flower which might save her dying friend.

Nubia turned her head left and right, scanning the ash-coated slope for a gleam of pink blossom. She did not know what Neapolitan cyclamen looked like, only that it was pink and had a remarkable ability to cure. The doctor had called it 'amulet'.

But there was no pink here. Only grey.

Nubia climbed slowly past olive trees, figs, cherry, quince and mulberry, all covered with the same soft crust of chalky ash. Here and there, black stumps showed where falling drops of fire had set an olive or palm tree alight. Some of the charred tree trunks were still smoking. It looked like the land of the dead, thought Nubia: the Land of Grey.

The blanket of ash muffled sound, but Nubia heard a cry drifting up from the beach below. She stopped, turned, and looked back down. From this distance, the buildings around the cove seemed tiny.

Through the thin film of ash which still drizzled from the sky, she could make out the Inn of Pegasus on the right of the cove, by the headland. A few fishing boats - as tiny as toys - were drawn up on the beach near the boathouses where Nubia and the others had taken shelter from the eruption.