{"product_id":"2940012773449","title":"INNOCENTS ABROAD Volume IV","description":"THE BURIED CITY OF POMPEII\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey pronounce it Pom-pay-e.  I always had an idea that you went down\u003cbr\u003einto Pompeii with torches, by the way of damp, dark stairways, just as\u003cbr\u003eyou do in silver mines, and traversed gloomy tunnels with lava overhead\u003cbr\u003eand something on either hand like dilapidated prisons gouged out of the\u003cbr\u003esolid earth, that faintly resembled houses.  But you do nothing the kind.\u003cbr\u003eFully one-half of the buried city, perhaps, is completely exhumed and\u003cbr\u003ethrown open freely to the light of day; and there stand the long rows of\u003cbr\u003esolidly-built brick houses (roofless) just as they stood eighteen hundred\u003cbr\u003eyears ago, hot with the flaming sun; and there lie their floors,\u003cbr\u003eclean-swept, and not a bright fragment tarnished or waiting of the\u003cbr\u003elabored mosaics that pictured them with the beasts, and birds, and\u003cbr\u003eflowers which we copy in perishable carpets to-day; and here are the\u003cbr\u003eVenuses, and Bacchuses, and Adonises, making love and getting drunk in\u003cbr\u003emany-hued frescoes on the walls of saloon and bed-chamber; and there are\u003cbr\u003ethe narrow streets and narrower sidewalks, paved with flags of good hard\u003cbr\u003elava, the one deeply rutted with the chariot-wheels, and the other with\u003cbr\u003ethe passing feet of the Pompeiians of by-gone centuries; and there are\u003cbr\u003ethe bake-shops, the temples, the halls of justice, the baths, the\u003cbr\u003etheatres--all clean-scraped and neat, and suggesting nothing of the\u003cbr\u003enature of a silver mine away down in the bowels of the earth.  The\u003cbr\u003ebroken pillars lying about, the doorless doorways and the crumbled tops\u003cbr\u003eof the wilderness of walls, were wonderfully suggestive of the \"burnt\u003cbr\u003edistrict\" in one of our cities, and if there had been any charred\u003cbr\u003etimbers, shattered windows, heaps of debris, and general blackness and\u003cbr\u003esmokiness about the place, the resemblance would have been perfect.  But\u003cbr\u003eno--the sun shines as brightly down on old Pompeii to-day as it did when\u003cbr\u003eChrist was born in Bethlehem, and its streets are cleaner a hundred\u003cbr\u003etimes than ever Pompeiian saw them in her prime.  I know whereof I\u003cbr\u003espeak--for in the great, chief thoroughfares (Merchant street and the\u003cbr\u003eStreet of Fortune) have I not seen with my own eyes how for two hundred\u003cbr\u003eyears at least the pavements were not repaired!--how ruts five and even\u003cbr\u003eten inches deep were worn into the thick flagstones by the\u003cbr\u003echariot-wheels of generations of swindled tax-payers?  And do I not know\u003cbr\u003eby these signs that Street Commissioners of Pompeii never attended to\u003cbr\u003etheir business, and that if they never mended the pavements they never\u003cbr\u003ecleaned them?  And, besides, is it not the inborn nature of Street\u003cbr\u003eCommissioners to avoid their duty whenever they get a chance?  I wish I\u003cbr\u003eknew the name of the last one that held office in Pompeii so that I\u003cbr\u003ecould give him a blast.  I speak with feeling on this subject, because I\u003cbr\u003ecaught my foot in one of those ruts, and the sadness that came over me\u003cbr\u003ewhen I saw the first poor skeleton, with ashes and lava sticking to it,\u003cbr\u003ewas tempered by the reflection that may be that party was the Street\u003cbr\u003eCommissioner.","brand":"SAP","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47178889822448,"sku":"2940012773449","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940012773449_p0.jpg?v=1763572543","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940012773449","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}