大学英语精读2pompeii
Robert Silverberg
Not very far from Naples, a strange city sleeps under the hot Italian sun. It is the city of Pompeii, and there is no other city quite like it in all the world. Nothing lives in Pompeii except crickets and beetles and lizards, yet every year thousands of people travel from distant countries to visit it.
Pompeii is a dead city. No one has lived there for nearly two thousand years—not since the summer of the year AD 79, to be exact.
Until that year Pompeii was a prosperous city of 25,000 people. Nearby was the Bay of Naples, an arm of the blue Mediterranean. Rich men came down from wealthy Rome to build aside villas. Farmlands surrounded Pompeii. Rising behind the city was the 4,000-foot Mount Vesuvius, a grass-covered slope where the shepherds of Pompeii took their goats to graze. Pompeii was a busy city and a happy one.
阿卡索It died suddenly, in a terrible rain of fire and ash. The tragedy struck on the 24th of August, AD 79. Mount Vesuvius, which had slept quietly for centuries, erupted with savage violence. Tons of hot ash fell on Pompeii, hiding it from sight. For three days the sun did not break through the clouds of volcanic ash that filled the sky. And when the eruption ended, Pompeii was buried deep. A city had perished.
Pompeii was forgotten. Then, venteen hundred years later, it was discovered again. Beneath the protecting shroud of ash, the city lay intact. Everything was as it had been the day Vesuvius erupted. There were still loaves of bread in the ovens of the bakeries. In the wine shops, the wine jars were in place, and on one counter could be en a stain where a customer had thrown down his glass and fled.
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To go to Pompeii today is to take a trip backward in time. The old city comes to life all around you. You can almost hear the clatter of hors' hoofs on the narrow streets, the cries of children and the laughter of the shopkeepers. The sky is cloudlessly blue, with the summer sun high in the sky. The grassy slopes of great Vesuvius ri to the heavens cumberbatch
thanks tobehind the city, and sunlight shimmers on the waters of the bay a thousand yards from the city walls. Ships from every nation are in port and strange languages can be heard in the streets.
Such was Pompeii on its last day. And so it is today, now that the volcanic ash has been cleared away. A good imagination is all you need to restore it to activity.
At dawn on August 24, in the year AD 79, Pompeii's 25,000 people awakened to another hot day in that hot summer. There was going to be a contest in the arena that night and the whole town was looking forward to the bloody fights of the gladiators. The children headed toward school, carrying slates and followed by their dogs. In the forum the town's important men had gathered after breakfast to read the political signs that had been posted during the night. Elwhere in the forum the wool merchants talked business. The banker was going over his account books. At the inn late-rising travelers from the East awakened and yawned and called for breakfast.
The quiet morning moved slowly along. There was nothing very unusual about Pompeii.
But tragedy was on its way. Beneath Vesuvius' vine-covered slopes a mighty force was about to break loo. At one o'clock in the afternoon the critical point was reached. The mountain blew up, raining death on thousands. Down in Pompeii, for miles from the summit, a tremendous explosion was heard.描写晴天的作文
"What was that?" People cried from one end of town to another. They stared at each other, puzzled, troubled. Were the gods fighting in heaven?
"Look!" somebody shouted. "Look at Vesuvius!"
fact
rowaggressiveness>around是什么意思Thousands of eyes turned upward. Thousands of arms pointed. A black cloud was rising from the shattered summit of the mountain. Higher and higher it ro. Like the trunk of a tree, it ro in the air, branching out as it climbed.
Minutes pasd. The sound of the explosion died away, but it still reverberated in everyone's ears. The cloud over Vesuvius continued to ri, black as night, higher and higher. A strange rain began to fall on Pompeii—a rain of stones. The stones were light. T
hey were pumice stones, consisting mostly of air bubbles. The poured down as though there had been a sudden cloudburst. The pumice stones did little damage.
英语学习视频网站"What is happening?" Pompeiians asked one another. They rushed to the temples—the Temple of Jupiter, the Temple of Apollo, the Temple of Isis. Priests tried to calm the citizens. The sky was dark. An hour went by and darkness still shrouded everything. All was confusion. The people of Pompeii now knew that doom was at hand. Their fears were redoubled when a tremendous rain of hot ash began to fall. The wooden roofs of some of the hous began to catch fire as the heat of the ash reached them. Other buildings were collapsing under the weight of the pumice stones.
In the first few hours, only the quick-witted managed to escape. A wealthy wool merchant called his family together and crammed jewelry and money into a sack. Lighting a torch, he led his little band out into the nightmare of the streets. Many hundreds of Pompeiians fled in tho first few dark hours. Stumbling in the darkness, they made their way to the city gates, then out and down to the harbor. They boarded boats and got away,
living to tell the tale of their city's destruction. Others preferred to remain within the city, huddling inside the temples, or in the public baths or in the cellars of their homes. They still hoped the nightmare would end.
