62
Flaring up higher, growing more crude,
The feast is raging, the talk is rude . .
My
dear little girl, oh, Pompeii,
Child of Caesarina and of slave . . .
Arabella sang out and then cleared her throat a bit.
PARTISAN REVIEW
"I haven't sung for a long time, but now I will sing everything
for you-from the beginning to the end, or from the end to the
beginning, or from the middle in both directions."
The volcano was roaring like all the radio jammers of Caesarist
times and of our days put together, but the feeble voice of the singer
was heard all the same.
"Whazz she singing?" asked Karandashkin, knocked off his
rocker by the sturgeon, which he had never before seen or eaten in
his entire life.
"She's singing her own stuff, not ours," explained the Pro–
Consul sluggishly, giving rare fish its customary tribute.
"It's amazing music, not human," croaked the Historic Titan
pensively, quoting his own famous thought on classical music (vol–
ume XII, chapter 2, page 10).
Flowing around the Hill of Glory, the streams of lava poured
down onto Pompeii. From the top it seemed that everything was fin–
ished, but more new crowds of people still kept ascending the Hill.
There came our workers and vacationers, the crowd fishing for
contemporary
kaij,
the advocates of maximum satisfaction of their
own constantly growing needs. Everybody was sure that it was a live
broadcast of Arabella's performance, so therefore nobody thought of
the destruction of Pompeii. Television and the government know
what they are doing; in this world there are no miracles.
Thus, with this faith in faithlessness, we all fell asleep on the
Hill of Glory. Each of us was forgetting everything blissfully and
irrevocably. For example, as my brain began to go to sleep, it was
forgetting stanzas from" Repercussions," my proud work designed
to win the minds of humankind, and a thought about the vanity of
vanities flashed through my head, but was immediately forgotten.
Nobody woke up, even when it started to rain. Streams of water
descended from the merciful heavens on high and pacified the vol–
cano. We were sleeping in clouds of hot steam, and then under the
constantly increasing gushes of a pure north wind. The wind blew
away the steam and cooled off the settling lava, but we were still
sleeping.
