Charles Ernest Beulé

“ What happens to-day, if studied with a little good sense and reflection, can enlighten us on what must have happened eighteen centuries ago. For instance, we have seen how slow lava-currents, remote from the vent of escape and cooled by contact with the ground and air, flowing around country-houses, level and consume them, with a sudden flaming up of roofs and floors. How could the stuccoes and the marble statues of Herculaneum remain unharmed, in their original color, free from crack or splinter, if they had been enveloped in lava? ”

“ But, to say all in a word, I state that on a late tour I examined the ground of Herculaneum, in the parts made accessible by excavation, with particular care. I could not find a square inch of lava! Every thing is ashes, nothing but ashes, and these ashes have been hardened by three agents—water, pressure, and time. It is exactly this hardness, which is not to be conceived of as very great, that has deceived visitors, particularly in the underground galleries dug out in exploring the theatre. ”

“ What causes buried a nourishing city in an instant out of sight of the inhabited world? It has been proved that Pompeii suffered an interment so incomplete that after a few days its inhabitants could recognize their dwellings, could encamp above and clear them out; Herculaneum, on the contrary, was buried so deep that the next day it was impossible to trace a vestige of it. The ready answer to all these questions usually is: "Lava worked all the ruin. Herculaneum was swallowed up under eighty feet of lava. ”

“ The descent is by stairways damp with exudations from the streets of Portici; overhead is heard the rolling of vehicles; we pass through tunnels polished with rubbing; we see on the smoky arches the smudge of torches, collecting for centuries; we shudder at the appalling gloom, and seem buried in the bowels of the earth. In a word, the passage impresses the imagination as strange and awful, and we reassure ourselves perforce with the thought that these galleries are hewn in lava, and beyond danger of caving in ”

“ Dufrénoy proved that water alone swept over Herculaneum heaps of scoria and pumice crumbled from La Somma; Dyer, Overbeck, Ernst Breton, and others, have affirmed in various languages, to no purpose, that nothing but ashes, wet to paste and hardened by pressure, covered over Herculaneum: no one heeded them, and the blame continues to be thrown on the lava, which makes excavation so costly and laborious.
But every one knows the nature and effects of lava. Lava is an incandescent mass, of so high temperature as to absorb and melt all fusible bodies ”

“ If the trial is made too quickly, the copper melts, and the coin, instead of leaving its image, disappears and mingles with the rest of the lava. How, then, do we find at Herculaneum so many ancient silver or copper coins, not merely undestroyed, but not even changed, by those waves of lava which attain a concentrated heat beyond all measurement? We know, too, that the ancients used colors with a mineral base in decorating their buildings; they will stand dampness from the earth, but the touch of fire changes their nature ”

“ The effect of this lifting was to raise the mouths of the two rivers, and throw back their waters on the city, and this overflow added its share of mud, ashes, and vegetable matter. Nor must we omit the canals filled up, the sewers choked, the aqueducts shattered by the earthquake, and pouring their contents into the valley. By degrees, as the mud settled in the streets, the courts, rooms, and dwellings, the level of the water rose, new deposits gathered; the ashes falling in dense masses from the sky, grew saturated, and increased the rising heaps. ”