Pompeii
“Against the gray, her oars stroked vivid flashes of white, stirring somewhere a long-forgotten memory of the leaden Rhine at daybreak—at Vetera, this must have been, thirty years ago—and the troop ferry of Legion V “The Larks” taking his cavalry to the far bank. Such times! What he would not give to embark again on a voyage at first light, or better still to command the fleet in action, a thing he had never done in his two years as admiral. But the effort of simply coming out of his library and... onto the terrace to see theMinerva go—of rising from his chair and taking a few short steps—had left him breathless, and when he lifted his arm to acknowledge the wave of the engineer he felt as if he were hoisting an exercise weight.“Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs are numb, sight, hearing, gait, even the teeth and alimentary organs die before we do, and yet this period is reckoned a portion of life.”Brave words. Easy to write when one was young and death was still skulking over a distant hill somewhere; less easy when one was fifty-six and the enemy was advancing in full view across the plain.He leaned his fat belly against the balustrade, hoping that neither of his secretaries had noticed his weakness, then pushed himself away and shuffled back inside.He had always had a fondness for young men of Attilius’s kind.MoreLess
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