The Angry Mountain

by Innes Hammond

‘Cheers,’ I said and raised the glass to my lips. It was cognac all right. I tipped it up and let it spill down inside my jacket. I thought he couldn’t possibly see in the dark, but he did.

‘Why do you do that?’

I’d slipped up and I knew it, for he’d spoken softly, almost menacingly. And there was no pretence of an American accent. It was Dr. Sansevino speaking in English.

I didn’t say anything and we faced each other. There was a sudden void in the pit of my stomach and the hairs crawled along my scalp. We were no longer play acting now. We were face to face — I knowing who he was, and he knowing that I knew. I slid my hand to my jacket pocket. It was a mistake. He saw the movement and knew that I was armed. He dived for the piano. Propped against the music rest I caught the dull gleam of metal. As he picked it up my hand tightened on the butt of the automatic.

And in that moment the rectangular space of the window blossomed in a monstrous flower of flame that went roaring out across the sky. With it came a noise that seemed to fill the heavens with sound. It was like fifty thousand express trains thundering through a tunnel. It was like a tornado sweeping over the open gates of Hell. It was a lion’s roar magnified until it shook the earth. The villa trembled to its foundations. The ground on which it was built rocked. It was as though the world were splitting open under the impact of another planet.

I saw Sansevino standing with the revolver in his hand staring at the window as though transfixed. His features shone with sweat in the ruddy glare. I followed the direction of his gaze and saw that the whole summit of Vesuvius was on fire. Two great fire gashes streaked the mountainside and from the crater a great column rose, red at the base with the reflected glow, but darkening to a hellish black as it opened out, writhing and twisting as though in agony. And where it blackened and spilled outwards across the sky it was criss-crossed with vivid flashes of forked lightning.

The noise went on and on, prolonging itself unbelievably. It was the noise of an angry mountain — a mountain breaking wind from the distended bowels of its rock stomach. Its gases and lava-excreta were being sprayed out of its crater orifice — thousands on thousands of feet upwards.

I stood absolutely motionless, unable to move, the sight was so staggering, the noise so terrifying. In a mental flash I saw Pompeii, buried under its millions of tons of hot ash, men and women caught and held in the midst of their daily life to be exhibited to tourists two thousand years later. Was this the same? Was this noise the roof of the mountain being blown to airborne fragments? Were we to be buried here for the benefit of archaeologists years hence?

All these thoughts and half my life poured through my mind as I stared up at that ghastly sight, the noise dinning in my ears so that it seemed as though there never could be any other sound in all the world.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, it ceased. The abrupt stillness seemed somehow more frightening than the noise. The noise had died to a faint, whistling sigh high up in the black sky. It was as though it had never been and all living things were dead and silent. Through the rectangular frame of the window the world looked just the same, the vineyards and orange groves serene and tranquil. But the light had changed. The scene was no longer saffron-tinted. It was red — red as Hell itself. The moon had been blotted out. The scene was lit only by the end of the red glow of the mountain.