Here are wall cabinets filled with tools, ornaments,
utensils, jewelry, furniture--all the small things that fulfilled
everyday functions in the first century of the Christian era.
Here is a kit of surgical implements, and some of the implements
might well belong to a modern hospital. There are foodstuffs
--grains and fruits; wines and oil; loaves of bread baked in 79
A. D. and left in the abandoned ovens; and a cheese that is still
in a fair state of preservation. It had been buried seventeen
hundred years when they found it; and if only it had been permitted
to remain buried a few years longer it would have been sufficiently
ripe to satisfy a Bavarian, I think.
Grimmer exhibits are displayed in cases stretched along the center
of the main hall--models of dead bodies discovered in the ruins
and perfectly restored by pouring a bronze composition into the
molds that were left in the hardened pumice after the flesh of
these victims had turned to dust and their bones had crumbled to
powder. Huddled together are the forms of a mother and a babe;
and you see how, with her last conscious thought, the mother tried
to cover her baby's face from the killing rain of dust and blistering
ashes. And there is the shape of a man who wrapped his face in a
veil to keep out the fumes, and died so. The veil is there,
reproduced with a fidelity no sculptor could duplicate, and through
its folds you may behold the agony that made his jaw to sag and
his eyes to pop from their sockets.
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