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

have completely disappeared. I stumble over the huge baking slabs, trying
to escape the punishment. Pursuing the merest hint of a decrease in the
noise level I turn in through an old stone doorway and begin a desperate
chase after silence: over boulders, through tangles of nettles and vines
where enormous butterflies make sluggish progress through the haze. As the
pain levels out and then begins to abate I know I'm heading in the right
direction. A couple more sharp turns past huge grass-covered mounds and
collapsed walls where lizards the size of rats gulp at the gritty air; the
noise fades right down, the pain ebbs and warm molten peaceful brassy sun
flows into my bruised head. I fall to my knees with my hands covering my
face and when I take them away I'm looking directly into the empty grey
eyesockets of a petrified man. His face is contorted by the pain he felt
as the lava flowed over him. I'm screaming because the man looks so much
like me it's like looking in a mirror and a lizard suddenly flits out of
one of the eyes and slips into the gaping mouth. The pain is back and this
time it doesn't go away until I black out.

I'm out for hours because when I come to, rubbing my forehead, the sun
casts quite different shadows on the stony face. Dismayingly I have to
admit he still looks like me. For several minutes I sit and watch the
insects that use his cavities and passages as they would any similar rock
formation.
Later I tell Flavia how closely his volcanic features resembled mine.
"It's quite common to hallucinate after an eruption," she says, applying a
piece of sticky tape to the newspaper covering the driver's window.
That's all very well, I think, but I'm 2000 years too late. Or did she
mean him? But I don't want to dwell on it because the faster the newspaper
goes up the sooner I can have her.
It clicked with me that I could make the most of Flavia's carbound
vivacity so that her passivity at home would not matter as much.
Through a narrow gap at the top of the windscreen I can see Vesuvius
rising and falling as Flavia and I punish the old Fiat's suspension.
In a few hours' time I'll be climbing Vesuvius herself. Flavia's away
somewhere -- working, she said -- so I'm to tackle the volcano alone and
although I could have taken a cab to the tourist car park halfway up the
mountain I decided to walk all the way from Ercolano which, as
Herculaneum, was itself covered by the same lava flows that buried
Pompeii. The road folds over on itself as I climb. The routine is soon
automatic as I maintain a regular ascent and efficient breathing. My mind
is rerunning the night before in Flavia's car. Six times her emotions
reached bursting point and boiled over. In the early hours the air in the
car was so thick and cloying we had to wind down the window, which meant
losing part of our newsprint screen, but the park had emptied hours
before.
In her apartment, where I swallowed glass after glass of fresh orange
juice, Flavia was once more still and grey. I was thinking about getting
her out in the car again but I knew I had to climb the volcano before I
left: it had been calling me and this was my last day in the city.
If the air were not so thick with dust, the view from halfway up the
mountain would be spectacular. I can just make out a darker shadow which