The Angry Mountain

by Innes Hammond

I wasn’t frightened — not then. I was too relieved at his departure. Fear came later with the dawn and the lava eating at the buildings across the street and the heat of it withering my body.

After he’d gone I crawled to the shelter of the door and lay there for a while recovering my breath and trying to sort things out. Stones fell clattering against the stonework, throwing dust in my face. Huddled close to the door they missed me and when the shower of lapilli had ended I started on a painful tour of my roof-top prison.

It was about fifty feet by thirty, surrounded by a stone balustrade a foot high. On one side was a drop to a street and on the opposite side, the side where I’d thrown the rotor arm, the house dropped to a garden carpeted in ash. In the middle of it I could see the faint metallic glimmer of my tin leg. The house was one of a row, but it was separated on either side from the neighbouring houses by a narrow alley, a sheer crevice about five feet across. There was no hope of crossing the gap and there was no way into the house from the roof other than by the door. If there’d been a clothesline, even an old piece of wood to act as a crutch I would have felt less helpless. But there was nothing, just the flat expanse of the roof, covered in ash, the foot-high balustrade, and in the middle the stone-built rabbit hutch with the door that led to the floor below. I hadn’t even a knife or any implement with which to set to work on the door.

I felt utterly helpless. My only hope was that Hilda would find the others and that they would come to look for me. At least I could call out to them, signal to them. I had the freedom of that roof-top. I could see what was happening. I wasn’t locked away in some evil-smelling room waiting for death to come suddenly in a fall of masonry. I could move about and watch what happened, and that did more than anything to sustain my courage in the hours that followed.

The stones that had fallen were pumice and hard and sharp. And since the door was my only hope of escape and the stones my only tools, I set to work to rub away the wood. I think I knew it was hopeless from the start. But I had to do something to keep my mind off the red glow of the lava flow piling into the village.

The streams on either side seemed to move faster, flowing down through the open country and curving round below Santo Francisco like two columns mounting a pincer attack on the village of Avin two miles lower down the slopes. The flow coming into Santo Francisco was narrower and slower. But it ate steadily into the village and I could mark its progress by the sound of crumbling buildings and the shower of sparks it set up as it ground over the ruins. I worked it out that it was destroying a house every ten minutes which meant roughly that it would reach my own house in approximately one and a quarter hours. It was then a quarter to six. I had until seven.

I suppose I worked away at that door for half an hour. Then I stopped. I was completely exhausted and dripping with sweat. The heat was already beginning to prick at my skin and my flesh felt tight and shrivelled. I had scraped about a quarter of an inch of wood away on a strip little more than a foot long. It was quite hopeless. The door was of tough, seasoned wood and a good inch thick. I hadn’t a hope of getting through it in time.

Dawn was beginning to break. I brushed the sweat from my eyes and slithered away from the door so that I could look at the mountain. The glow of the crater was fading and in the faint, cold light I could see the dense pall that covered the sky — a writhing, billowing cloud of utter blackness. The lave flow no longer showed as a fiery streak. It was a huge black band coming out of the side of the mountain near the top of the ash slope. It came down like a thick wrist, broadened out into a palm and then split into four fingers. Smoke rose from it in a lazy cloud and the mountain behind it trembled in the heat.

The stump of my leg hurt abominably where Sansevino had kicked at it. My head ached and my lips were swollen and blubbery. I pulled up the leg of my trousers. The flesh where it was drawn tight over the bone was bleeding and coated in grit. Sitting there in the ash I did my best to clean it and then bound it up with a strip torn from my shirt and tied it with my handkerchief. I could have done with some water, not only to cleanse it, but to drink, for my throat was parched with the heat and the acrid sulphur fumes. But it didn’t seem to matter much. The lava was very near now. Buildings were crumbling continuously all along the wide front of its advance into the village and the sound of their falling seemed so close that more than once I looked to see whether the next house had gone.

Then the sun came up. It was an orange disc barely visible through the haze of gas and ash that filled the sky. And as it rose higher it got fainter. I thought of the mountains up there on the back of Italy. The villages would be basking in clear, warm sunlight. And beyond would lie the blue of the Adriatic. And yet here I was under a cloud of ash, faced with a stinking, suffocating end. Something glittered in the ash. It was Zina’s pistol. Sansevino had dropped it in the blindness of his anger. I slipped it into my pocket — if I couldn’t face the lava, then …