Around midday the mountain burst open. Across the bay, seventeen-year-old Pliny the Younger saw a huge cloud rising, shaped, he wrote, like an umbrella pine.
His uncle, Pliny the Elder, commander of the fleet, sailed toward the coast to rescue people and never came back. In Pompeii, ash and pumice fell for hours, roofs collapsed, and the next morning surges of burning gas swept through the streets.
The town lay buried and forgotten for more than sixteen centuries. When excavators found it, the hollows left by the victims in the ash allowed them to make plaster casts of the last moments of the people of Pompeii.
