By this eruption Pompeii was buried under a layer of pumice and ashes 20 feet thick. For a long period of years the inhabitants of the neighbourhood came hither and digged up with their spades one thing or another, but then Pompeii sank into the night of oblivion and slumbered under the earth for fifteen hundred years. At last the town was discovered again, and excavations were commenced. Country houses, fields, and clumps of mulberry trees had sprung up on the deep bed of ashes. Not till fifty years ago did modern investigation take Pompeii seriously in hand, and now more than half the town is laid bare. Strangers can ride unhindered through the streets, look into the shops and baths, and admire the fine wall-paintings in the palaces of the great. The columns of Jupiter's temple, so long buried in complete darkness, are again lighted by the sun, and cast their shadows as of old over the stone flags of the Forum (Plate XXVII.). The Street of Tombs is exposed, and young cypresses grow up among the monuments. The dead, which were already buried when Vesuvius scattered its ashes over them, listen now to strange footsteps on the road. But the unfortunates who were buried alive under the shower of ashes have decayed and turned to dust. And yet they may still be seen in the museums, with distorted limbs and their faces to the ground. We see them in the position they assumed when they fell and the ashes were bedded close to their sides. Thus they remained lying for eighteen hundred years, imbedded as in a mould. Their bodies returned to the earth, but the empty space remained. By pouring plaster into these forms, life-like figures of persons have been reproduced just as they were when death overtook them. Here lies a woman who fell outside her house and grasped with convulsive fingers a bag full of gold and silver. Here is a man resting his heavy head on his elbow, and here a dog which has curled itself up before it was at last suffocated.