The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (24 page)

At the same time, in hopes of finding further additions for her collection, Elisabetta ordered that the Herculaneum excavations be resumed. Under the official direction of Charles, and the unofficial direction of Charles’ mother, the vast ruins of Herculaneum and the recently rediscovered Pompeii were systematically plundered.

These efforts were led by a Spanish artillery engineer named Captain Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre, whose sole mission was to find everything of monetary value and pluck it from the earth. As Alcubierre exhausted one source of buried treasure, he would delve unthinkingly into the next, backfilling each prior section with dirt from the new one.

It was under Alcubierre that the Villa dei Papiri and its library of scrolls were discovered.

Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero and friend of King Charles, became the first to attempt opening the papyrus scrolls. In an effort to soften the charred, brittle papyri, he immersed them in mercury. This dissolved the scrolls, and many of them were lost. Of course, di Sangro chose the most well-preserved of the scrolls for his experiments, thus leaving behind those that were even harder to decipher.

King Charles himself was fascinated with the scrolls. In addition to allowing di Sangro to work with them, Charles sent to Rome for assistance with them as well. Vatican calligrapher Padre Piaggio was the first to manipulate some of the scrolls
without
destroying them. Piaggio’s infinite patience and sense of innovation produced a device that could at last unwind the scrolls, at a rate of one half inch per day. It was this device that I had seen in the Naples Archeological Museum on my first day in Italy.

Slowly and painstakingly, Padre Piaggio succeeded in being the first to unroll one of the papyrus documents recovered from the Villa dei Papiri. This single act took four years.

Piaggio continued unrolling additional scrolls and set to diligently copying their text. The Vatican calligrapher produced remarkably faithful reproductions of the text despite the condition of the scrolls and also despite the fact that he neither spoke nor read modern Greek, let alone ancient Greek.

Translation of the content was equally difficult. The papyrus was in such terrible condition and so many pieces had been lost that much of the author information and content were either missing or misunderstood. Indeed, several scrolls were literally translated backward in their entirety, and only many, many years later were the mistakes even recognized as such.

Meanwhile, the second factor involved in bringing Herculaneum to light was the expanding influence of the Enlightenment itself during the eighteenth century. This philosophical movement prompted a great interest in the study of antiquities.

A Grand Tour of Europe was considered an essential element of an upper-class education, and the aristocratic travelers known to Italians as
milordi
—“my lords”—came from far and wide throughout Europe. Rome was a quintessential stopping point, and soon Naples became one as well. As rumors of the ancient treasures began making their way across Europe, increasing numbers of Grand Tourists became determined to see the ruins for themselves, as well as to purchase the many replicas of Herculaneum booty that were suddenly all the rage.

Artists who could faithfully reproduce these coveted artifacts found abundant work in Naples. One such artist was Camillo Paderni, who was fascinated by the flawlessly frozen cross-sections of ancient Roman life. As he toured the excavation sites, Paderni produced image upon image of a world formerly unbeknownst to the public.

Paderni was also appalled that these cross-sections were being so brutally destroyed and began writing letters of complaint about Captain Alcubierre’s methods. When antiquarian and well-respected writer Johann Joachim Winckelmann chimed in with his scathing critique that Alcubierre knew “as much of antiquities as the moon knows of crabs,” Alcubierre was sent to a different post.

Alcubierre was replaced by Karl Weber, a Swiss architect and engineer, who produced the first true maps of the Villa dei Papiri and its surroundings as well as the many tunnels still present throughout the area today. Approximately eleven hundred additional scrolls were found and removed from the villa during Weber’s supervision of the project.

Then the inevitable fate of monarchy politics intervened and set in motion another end to the Herculaneum excavations. King Charles’ father, Philip V of Spain, had died in 1754. By 1759, Charles could no longer shirk his responsibility to the kingdom, and he reluctantly left Naples for Spain. Governing in Naples in his stead was a temporary stand-in until Charles’ spoiled eight-year-old son Ferdinand could come of age.

Without the king’s support, money for the project was diverted elsewhere. Excavations at Herculaneum were forcibly halted in favor of ongoing efforts at Pompeii, which lay considerably closer to the surface, making it easier and cheaper to explore. The death of Charles’ mother, Elisabetta, the woman who had first initiated the work, sealed the fate of Herculaneum. The secrets still contained within the Villa dei Papiri would once again be forced to wait.

Charles’ son Ferdinand came of age in 1767 and became the arrogant, ignorant boy-king of Naples—an event that would no doubt have represented the final nail in the coffin of Herculaneum and the villa if not for one unlikely variable.

Her name was Maria Carolina, and she would become Ferdinand’s queen despite her loudly voiced opinion on the matter: “You might as well cast me into the sea.” She was also the elder sister of the girl who would become known to history as Marie Antoinette, and whose notorious fate would only intensify Maria Carolina’s hatred of all things French.

Maria Carolina became a close friend of Padre Piaggio, sitting with him for hours as he painstakingly unrolled a scroll. She safeguarded the papyrus scrolls from the Villa dei Papiri throughout the extensive fallout in Naples resulting from the French Revolution, and she successfully kept them from the hands of the pillaging Napoleon Bonaparte—for a while.

At the exact moment Alyssa mentioned Napoleon’s name, I felt my chair shift beneath me, as if the disembodied head of Marie Antoinette had spoken.

At first, I thought I was experiencing a sudden attack of vertigo, a residual effect of the bends. I took a deep breath, my eyes scanning the small space of the subterranean kitchen. Then, an audible rumbling began beneath me, and a cupboard over the break room’s small countertop swung open. The contents of the cupboard slid out, hitting the countertop and the floor beneath and shattering.

Alyssa stopped talking and looked curiously around her. “Get under the doorway,” she said authoritatively.

“I’m from California,” I reminded her, already moving into the most earthquake-safe area of the kitchen. For perhaps forty seconds, Alyssa and I huddled together under the thick doorframe leading out of the break room and into the lab. The rumblings continued, and we could hear the sounds of additional items crashing to the floor.

“Is this lab earthquake-compliant?” I asked, already casting my mind back to the tour she had just given me to try and recall what I had seen. I remembered that there were acid cabinets underneath the fume hoods. I was reasonably sure that there were also cabinets for flammables and other combustibles. But I had not paid enough attention to notice if the lab’s occupants had been using them.

All too frequently, scientists, in their haste, fail to store chemicals properly. They take a bottle of acid from an acid cabinet, and, when finished using it, they just stash it on the shelf over their bench. That is fine, until there is an earthquake and they are standing beneath that shelf. It is a very real concern in California, and evidently in Naples as well, I observed.

We heard a scream, and I had my answer.

Alyssa and I raced into the chemistry lab, where we found a young girl struggling to operate the laboratory shower. While labs are universally equipped with such devices, and they are operated with a simple, clearly marked, user-friendly lever, most scientists have never had the misfortune of occasion to use one, and the girl before us was panicking.

I ran to her and pulled the lever. A heavy spray of fresh water instantly doused the young lady from head to toe.

“
Strip
,” I ordered sternly, and she looked at me with wide eyes. “You heard me!
NOW!
”

With shaking hands, the girl quickly removed her top but then had trouble with her jeans, which were wet and glued stubbornly to her legs. After a few moments of struggling, she managed to get out of them.

As she stood under the water in bra and panties, I quickly scanned the girl’s body for signs of rash or other trauma to her skin. I saw nothing. “What did you spill?”

“Concentrated acrylamide.”

Her answer explained the lack of visible symptoms. She would show none today, perhaps not ever. The effects of acrylamide poisoning, if there are any, can take years to manifest. It is a powerful neurotoxin, and exposure to it can induce Parkinson’s-like symptoms. I hoped this young girl would never experience them, but the only way of knowing would be to keep in contact with her for the rest of her life. And there was nothing either she or I could do about it anyway.