There was an immense building wherein the juggernauts were assembled, but the lengths of steel were out in the yard in rusted stacks according to their cross sectional shapes. Mort Decker drove a yellow mobile crane—which they called The Jib—that lifted the lengths from the stacks and conveyed them into the assembly building as required. The crane jockey rode on the mudguard of the vehicle and, when the head of the jib was over the appropriate stack, climbed up, looped the chain about the required number of lengths, hooked it up, and leapt back onto the mudguard as Mort carried the trophy off.
 “Lines overhead, Mort,” I would call from the mudguard, as Mort manoeuvred the crane about the yard. Mort had been getting the jib under the power lines successfully for a decade before I became his jockey, but it provided for both a sense of teamwork, of camaraderie.

 

`Behold !’ he shouted with a voice of thunder, which stilled the roar of the crowd; `behold how the gods protect the guiltless!  The fires of the avenging Orcus burst forth against the false witness of my accusers !’
The eyes of the crowd followed the gesture of the Egyptian, and beheld, with ineffable dismay, a vast vapour shooting from the summit of Vesuvius, in the form of a gigantic pine-tree; the trunk, blackness—the branches, fire!—a fire that shifted and wavered in its hues with every moment, now fiercely luminous, now of a dull and dying red, that again blazed terrifically forth with intolerable glare!
There was a dead, heart-sunken silence—through which there suddenly broke the roar of the lion, which echoed back from within the building by the sharper, fiercer yells of its fellow-beast. Dread seers were they of the burden of the atmosphere, and wild prophets of the wrath to come!
Then there arose on high the universal shrieks of women; the men stared at each other, but were dumb. At that moment they felt the earth shake beneath their feet; the wall of the theatre trembled; and, beyond the disturbance, they heard the crash of falling roofs; an instant more and the mountain-cloud seemed to roll towards them, dark and rapid, like a torrent; at the same time, it cast forth from its bosom a shower of ashes mixed with vast fragments of burning stone! Over the crushing vines—over the desolate streets—over the amphitheatre itself—far and wide—with many a mighty splash in the agitated sea—fell that awful shower!
    Actually, The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton was—like Moby Dick—pretty boring for most of the journey and a rather tame portrait of life in Ancient Rome, but then the above passage occurs and shifts it into a well-deserved place in classic literature. The last fifty pages, starting in the gladiatorial arena and ending with the destruction of the city, is vivid and powerful stuff, but you should only read the preceding 450 pages if you wish to care about the characters as Vesuvius bumps them off.