Darkness Into Light

79AD

The light poured in through the impluvium, the water below reflecting the pale blue of the sky that day. Small ripples allowed the knowledge that there was a light breeze outside without the effort of leaving the atrium.

The pages of the book rippled with this light breeze, her perfectly coiffed hair barely shifting. She was a point of contrast to the constant movement around her, people coming and going to pay calls to the pater familias, conduct business.

To sit and stare at that same reflection and those same ripples would show a gradual increase in the force of the wind and thereby the anger of the gods, but today was an ordinary day and life continued as normal for the Pompeiians. Then the sky had gone dark, the winds had blown a cloud over them conveying the wrath of the divine beings who controlled every aspect of their lives. No one was sure what they'd done to displease them.

Rocks beat down upon them as they ran to places they felt would be safe from the coming earthquake, ash filled the air, and, more gradually, their lungs.

Yet still the woman sat, book in hand, eyeing the ripples and reflections in the pool beneath the impluvium. Counting the small rocks that kept growing in number until she almost lost count.

She could hear the screams. Clearly the gods were so angered at this point that they were ending the world, neutering it so they could start fresh. It seemed to her that the owners of the panicked screams didn't know they must face up to the gods for their misdeeds.

Children screamed, cried, called for their parents. Parents called for them in return.

By now, hours had passed. There was a hush, deathly quiet. Images of bodies lying on the ground, seemingly asleep, chests unmoving in their eternal slumber filled her mind. Their lungs had filled with ash and they had breathed their last.

The bodies of children are surrounded by crying mothers begging the gods to bring them back, the elderly by whole resigned families before they retreated into the relative safety of the nearest building.

Then, the fourth gas surge hit the people of Pompeii and all was darkness as the ash settled in over their bodies.

1860

The dirt inserted its way into her nose as its wound its way into all of her clothes and under what little remained of her short and practical fingernails. She gave a mental shrug and continued to dig. Forgive the pun, but she could feel it in her bones that something special lay mere metres beneath her shovel.

Calling for the plaster team over her shoulder as she intuitively sensed that she was almost to a cavity that would be unique to all the others currently having the rock chipped away from the clean plaster after they were judged by Giuseppe to be adequately set.

Watching mesmerised as the pipe was inserted into the small hole as the process was overseen by Giuseppe Fiorelli, she felt a heightened sense of awe at the uncovering of history and her involvement in it. This was her first dig, having only just graduated from university.

This was her dream and living it had not always lived up to her child-like expectations, but this moment... This moment had potential, she could feel it.

Closing her eyes and enjoying the Campanian sunshine on the backs of her eyelids, she allowed the images to assail her. Her imagination filled in the gaps left by Giuseppe's revolutionary work, making her wish for a pencil to capture it for eternity.

Her ears rang with the sound of remembered screams, her mind's eye filled with children crying, faces runny with snot, ash stuck to them. They didn't seem to notice her as they ran past, looking for their mother. Mother's themselves screamed for their missing children or crouched over tiny coughing bodies. Soon even the sound of coughing ceased, as the people around her succumbed to the ash building up in their lungs. Those that had not had already sought shelter from what they thought would only be an earthquake like the one 17 years before.

All around her was the evidence of chaos, of order unchecked as people panicked. Gaping cracks in walls, clearly left unrepaired for quite some time allowed the notion that Pompeii was already declining from its once glorious peak to seep past the disbelief that archaeology and a sixth sense could work in harmony and allow her an advantage over her peers.

Opening her eyes after the shocking realisation to find eyes on her, more importantly, the eyes of Giuseppe Fiorelli himself, she realised they were speaking to her. Asking her if she wanted to do the honours.

Quickly putting two and two together, she realised that while her mind was in 79AD, the plaster had set. Now they were asking her to carefully chip away the rock from her discovery.

An hour later, only Giuseppe remained at her side. It had stopped bothering her long ago once she had been suitably engrossed in her work.

She was using her tiniest chisel at this point, and just starting to see the first fragments of fresh plaster with each miniscule movement. Proceeding with care, slowly the shape of a young woman began to emerge from the volcanic rock. It was when she reached her lower torso that something unexpected began to protrude from the rock. At first thinking it was some sort of deformity, it took her heat addled brain longer than it ought to have for her to realise it was just a book clutched tightly to the woman's body as her muscles had clenched into the pugilist pose with the heat wave of Vesuvius' fourth surge.

Shocked for a reason they could not quite identify, she and Fiorelli stared at the plaster cast of this clearly educated woman who had died too young.

Later, over a beer, they would discuss how that was the point in which they had begun to see Pompeii completely differently from any other ancient city they had every studied or excavated.

2015

It was dark, then, with a click, on came the light. Curled beneath the covers of her bed seemed the appropriate place to begin reading her Ancient History textbooks to start the next topic: Pompeii.

It had been discovered by accident, she learned, an ancient city forgotten to time, found again.

So the process of learning began, both for her and the men and women who would become known as archaeologists as each excavated the ancient city, learning from their mistakes as they went. Much knowledge was lost forever to the darkness, yet it paled in comparison to the discoveries made through new innovations in technology, eventually leading towards the collation of knowledge clutched between her cold hands.

The very nature of Pompeii allowed many observations to be made into how the Romans lived that could not have been made previously, as the Romans were cremated upon their deaths.

A woman had been discovered, book clutched to her chest, alone. No one understood how or shy she'd been there - who she was. She was a mystery. Of all the things brought from darkness into light, she had been left behind.

It made her wonder; what would the Pompeiians have thought of the modern world and their place in its development?

A/N: The image above is one of Fiorelli's plaster casts and if you google them there are heaps more if you're curious. Hope you enjoyed my story that I actually wrote for one of my HSC exams... Hopefully they don't think I plagiarised my own work... Crazy people these days!! ;P