The sun was slipping down the western sky and was laced with red like a bloodshot eye, with a Jacob's Ladder of rainbow shafts streaming down from it to the water, when we turned inland; and after several small minor stops, while the automobile caught its breath and had the heaves and the asthma, we came to Pompeii over a road built of volcanic rock. I have always been glad that we went there on a day when visitors were few. The very solitude of the place aided the mind in the task of repeopling the empty streets of that dead city by the sea with the life that was hers nearly two thousand years ago. Herculaneum will always be buried, so the scientists say, for Herculaneum was snuggled close up under Vesuvius, and the hissing-hot lava came down in waves; and first it slugged the doomed town to death and then slagged it over with impenetrable, flint-hard deposits. Pompeii, though, lay farther away, and was entombed in dust and ashes only; so that it has been comparatively easy to unearth it and make it whole again. Even so, after one hundred and sixty-odd years of more or less desultory explorations, nearly a third of its supposed area is yet to be excavated. It was in the year 1592 that an architect named Fontana, in cutting an aqueduct which was to convey the waters of the Sarno to Torre dell' Annunziata, discovered the foundations of the Temple of Isis, which stood near the walls on the inner or land side of the ancient city. It was at first supposed that he had dug into an isolated villa of some rich Roman; and it was not until 1748 that prying archaeologists hit on the truth and induced the Government to send a chain gang of convicts to dig away the accumulations of earth and tufa. But if it had been a modern Italian city that was buried, no such mistake in preliminary diagnosis could have occurred. Anybody would have known it instantly by the smell. I do not vouch for the dates--I copied them out of the guidebook; but my experience with Italian cities qualifies me to speak with authority regarding the other matter.