The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) Read Online Free PDF Page A

heavily intermingled. And it was during that time that a powerful change in thinking began to evolve.
    “The ancients became increasingly motivated by empirical data, things they observed. They began to build hospitals instead of temples to cure their sick. They conducted autopsies to explain causes of death. They developed sophisticated surgical instruments, some of them similar to instruments still used to this day. They developed scientific methods and drew conclusions based on hard, experimental evidence—”
    I snapped to attention. “Sorry, what?”
    “In short,” she said, “during this era, these three cultures began a shift in thinking, from superstition to true science.”
    “And this is the era you study?” I asked.
    “It is.”
    “What caused the change? What led these cultures toward science and away from superstition?”
    Alyssa smiled. “That is the central question around which my research has been focused for nearly twenty years,” she said. “I believe it was the work of one woman.”
     

    Alyssa guided me to an elevator. We stepped inside, and she pushed the button for the top floor of the museum. When we stepped out, in sharp contrast to the mummified crocodiles, ordinary objects now surrounded us.
    Curio cabinets lining the walls contained a large assortment of metal and ceramic dishes and vases. Centered in the room was a large case containing a single blue vase, clearly a treasure from a lost era. I approached one cabinet that caught my eye. Inside it, several blue-and aqua-colored pieces of glassware sparkled elegantly, the lighting in the room passing through the glass of the curio cabinet and ricocheting playfully back from the glass of the objects.
    “They’re lovely,” I said offhand.
    “They are two thousand years old,” Alyssa replied. “We are now in the part of the museum dedicated to artifacts retrieved from Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae. All of the objects in this room were preserved, untouched, beneath several feet of volcanic lava, ash, and mud following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. That eruption, and the stunning preservation of those cities that accompanied it, gave us the most complete picture of the ancient world we have ever been able to observe.”
    I peered more closely at the fragile glass items. “How did they survive the eruption without being crushed?”
    “Because a four-hundred-degree-Celcius pyroclastic flow of hot gas enveloped the area with such intense heat that the water vaporized out of organic objects, and ash fell steadily for hours, reaching a depth of more than ten feet. Objects were essentially carbonized before the ash fell, and then the ash encapsulated everything, forming a seal which remained for seventeen hundred years.”
    “Whoa,” I said, trying to imagine a heat so intense that it could instantly desiccate an entire city.
    We passed through a series of spaces and corridors into another small room containing glass exhibition cases. In the center of one was an instrument that resembled an old, battered loom. Long, knotted strands of a charcoal-colored substance hung suspended from it. I read the English version of the description and then leaned forward, gaping in disbelief. The suspended cluster looked more like curing meat hanging in a slaughterhouse than what it actually was.
    “That jumbled mess is made of paper ?” I asked Alyssa.
    “It’s papyrus,” she said. “This room is dedicated to the Villa dei Papiri —Villa of the Papyri. The villa is named for its large library containing approximately two thousand papyrus scrolls. These scrolls were among the objects buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. They were rediscovered during the excavation of Herculaneum that began in the 1700s. They are still legible to this day.
    “What you are looking at is the tool developed in 1756 to unroll them, and that ‘jumbled mess’ is one of the actual scrolls from Herculaneum. It took four years to unwind the very first