"Nicholas Royle - Flying Into Naples" - читать интересную книгу автора (Royle Nicholas)

covered with cloud. The air over the city is hazy. On the little table
there's a note for me from Flavia. She's had to go out for the day and can
I entertain myself? I'm to help myself to whatever I want. She suggests I
visit Pompeii.

The Circumvesuviana railway trundles out of the east side of Naples and
skirts the volcano, calling at St Giorgio and Ercolano, the sun beating
down on the crumbling white apartment buildings. I avoid the modern town
at Pompeii and head straight for the excavations. German tourists haggle
over the entrance fee. I pay and go through, detaching myself from the
crowd as soon as I can. They saunter off down the prescribed route armed
with guide books from which their self-elected leader will read out loud,
peculiarly choosing the English-language section, as they pass by the
monuments of particular note. The same man -- he's wearing a red shirt
which bulges over the waistband of his creamy linen trousers -- carries
the camcorder and will listen impassively to anyone who suggests they
operate it instead. They're a distraction from my surroundings: a city
preserved to a far greater degree than anything I had been expecting. I
wander off into an area of recent excavations where I'm alone with the
buzzing insects and basking lizards that dart away at my approach. The
heat is overpowering and after a quarter of an hour threading my way
through dug-out paved streets bordered with shoulder-high walls and great
swathes of overflowing undergrowth I have to sit down for a rest. I look
up at Vesuvius, a huge black shape jiggling from side to side behind the
thickening haze.
A bee the size of a fat cockroach lumbers towards me buzzing like a whole
canful of blowflies and I have to duck to avoid it. Even when it's gone I
can still hear it, as if I hadn't managed to get out of the way quick
enough and somehow it got inside my head. The sun, even through the dust
in the air, amplifies the noise and cooks my skull so that everything
inside it rattles like loose beans. Off down a long straight street to my
right I recognise the party of German tourists standing to attention as
they listen to the man in the red shirt with the stomach, the camcorder
and the guide book. His words are just a low hum to me amid the constant
buzz in my ears. My limbs tingle as if electricity is being passed through
them, then they go completely numb and the buzzing gets slower and even
louder. At the far end of the long straight street the Germans have frozen
in position. The man in the red shirt is in the act of raising the
camcorder to his eye, a woman in a wraparound top and shorts is caught in
the act of leaning backwards -- not ungracefully -- to correct the fit of
her smart training shoe. The air between them and me is thick with shiny
dust, glittering in the golden sunshine. The tiny particles are dancing
but the figures remain petrified.
Suddenly they're moving but in a group rather than individually. They are
shifted silently to one side like a collection of statues on an invisible
moving platform. It's as if they're being shunted into another world while
I'm left dodging the insects in this one and I want to go with them. Maybe
wherever they're going there won't be this terrible grinding noise which
is giving the inside of my skull such a relentless battering.
By the time some feeling returns to my arms and legs the German tourists