The Angry Mountain

by Innes Hammond

I don’t think I was frightened so much as bitter. I could so easily have not been here. If I hadn’t gone out to that villa — if I hadn’t arranged my trip so that I went from Czechoslovakia to Milan. But what was the good of saying If. If I’d been born a Polynesian instead of an Englishman I wouldn’t have lost my leg in three operations that made me sweat to think about. I folded my empty trouser leg up over the stump of my leg and tied it there with my tie. Then I crawled across the roof to the side nearest the lava.

It was full daylight now, or as near to daylight as it would be. I could see the black band of the lava flow broadening out as it piled up against the village. It was only three houses away and as I watched the third house crumbled into mortar dust and disappeared. Only two more houses away now. Three little nigger boys sitting in a row…. The damned bit of doggerel ran in my brain until the second house went. And then there was one. Away to the right I caught a glimpse of the front of the lava choking a narrow street and spilling steadily forward. It was black like clinker and as it spilled down along the street, little rivulets of molten rock flowed red.

The air was full of the dust of broken buildings now. My mouth and throat were dry and gritty with it and the air shimmered with intense heat. I could no longer hear the roar of gases escaping from Vesuvius. Instead my world was full of a hissing and sifting — it was a steady, unrelenting background of sound to the intermittent crash of stone and the crumbling roar of falling plaster and masonry.

Then the next building”began to go. I watched, fascinated, as a crack opened across the roof. There was a tumbling roar of sound, the crack widened, splitting the very stone itself, and then the farther end of the building vanished in a cloud of dust. There was a ghastly pause as the lava consolidated, eating up the pile of rubble below. Then cracks ran splitting all across the remains of the roof not five yards away from me. The cracks widened, spreading like little fast-moving rivers, and then suddenly the whole roof seemed to sink, vanishing away below me in a great rumble of sound and disappearing into the dust of its own fall.

I And as the dust settled I found myself staring at the lava face itself. It was a sight that took my breath away. I wanted to cry out, to run from it — but instead I remained on my hands and one knee staring at it, unable to move, speechless, held in the shock of seeing the pitiless force of Nature angered.

I have seen villages and towns bombed and smashed to rubble by shell-fire. But Cassino, Berlin — they were nothing to this. Bombing or shelling at least leaves the torn shells and smashed rubble of buildings to indicate what was once there. The lava left nothing. Of the half of Santo Francisco that it had overrun there was no trace. Before me stretched a black cinder embankment, quite flat and smoking with heat. It was impossible to think of a village ever having existed there. It had left no trace and I could scarcely believe that only a few minutes before there had been buildings between me and the lava and that I’d seen them toppling, buildings that had been occupied for hundreds of years. Only away to the left the dome of a church stood up out of the black plain. And even as I noticed it the beautifully symmetrical dome cracked open like a flower, fell in a cloud of dust and was swallowed completely.

In my fascination I leaned forward and peered over the balcony. I had a brief glimpse of a great wall of cinders and rivulets of white-hot rock spilling forward across the rubble remains of the house that had just vanished, spilling across the narrow alley and piling up against the house on which I stood. Then the heat was singeing my eyebrows and I was slithering back to the far end of the roof in the grip of a sudden and uncontrollable terror.

To be wiped out like that, obliterated utterly and all because of a wooden door. I heard myself screaming — screaming and screaming for help through grit-sore throat. Once I thought I heard an answering call, but it didn’t stop me. I went on screaming till suddenly a crack ran splintering across the roof, splitting it in two.

The sudden realisation of the inevitability of death gripped me then, stifling my screams, stiffening my nerves to meet the end. I knelt down in the soft ash of the roof and prayed — prayed as I used to pray before those damned operations, praying that I’d not give way to fear, that I’d face what had to be without flinching.

And as the crack widened out I felt suddenly calm. If only the end would come quickly. That was all I prayed for. I didn’t want to be buried alive in the rubble and wait half-suffocated for the lava to roll over me.