Kallatah was asleep with her weather jacket rolled up under her head, a look of almost childlike innocence on her face. She looked so beautiful that I was afraid if I knelt and kissed her she'd shatter and fly apart like one of those ancient statues that have lain for centuries in the buried past of the Earth.
There was no need for me to wake her. The rumbling did it. It started far off, and came slowly nearer, sweeping down upon the hut like the drums of primitive warfare beating at first in ominous undertones and then ever more loudly as they converged upon their mark.
The drums were nature's own, and they were beating deep within the ground. With the beating came a heaving and a quaking, and right where I was standing a jagged rent appeared suddenly in the dried red clay which had been baked by Geipgos himself to line the floor of his hut.
I had timed the eruption with the sure instinct of a trained scientist who knows just how to fill in the gaps left by the hair-trigger measurements of precision instruments with an intuitive sixth-sense. It could have occurred an hour sooner or an hour later, but I wasn't surprised that it occurred when it did.
Only Kallatah was surprised. She awoke with the first quake and looked up at me. Her eyes grew wide and startled, and suddenly she was on her feet, clinging to my arm and screaming.
I shook her until she grew quiet, then drew her to the hut's swaying entrance and pointed out into the flame-streaked shadows. Flashes of light were converging on the village from all directions, cascading over the thatched roofs with their central supporting poles, sending women and children scrambling frenziedly into the open.
"The volcano's in full eruption!" I whispered.
"How can you stand there so calmly?" Her face was white. "If a quake opens a fissure at our feet—"
"We'll never know a moment's pain," I said. "It's the one great danger. The lava flow won't reach the village."