The Day the World Ended, page 10
Three miles away, Dr. Guérin, the man the Vicar-General planned to censure in his sermon for breaking the Sabbath, was preparing to inspect his workers. Square in the saddle on his gray stallion trotting out toward the fields, he could hear ahead the steady beating of a drum and a low moaning chant. Then through a gap in the cane he saw the long double rank of workers going steadily forward, leveling the tall cane as they progressed, singing, accompanied by a drummer boy who kept abreast of them.
The men worked in pairs, each pair fifty feet from the next. Each man carried a murderous-looking weapon: a heavy bladed sword, the machete of Latin America, nearly four feet long and curved like a buccaneer’s cutlass. The swordsmen wielded the machetes with both hands, swinging the heavy blades close to the ground, the tall stalks toppling before the steel in windows.
A few yards behind each pair of men came a woman, whose task it was to gather up the long stalks of cane and bind them in bundles. These women were the ammareuses, a Creole corruption of the French amoureuses, the lovers, a nickname for the favors they readily dispensed during the breaks for food.
Dr. Guérin watched as the bundled sheaves of cane were loaded on to clumsy wooden-wheeled carts drawn by oxen. Work was progressing well; his son Eugène told him the carts were on their third journey to the factory. He was about to turn toward the building himself when a sudden screaming came from the far end of the advancing ranks. The line wavered, then broke, as hundreds of workers rushed to the scene.
When Dr. Guérin reached the area, there was nothing anybody could do. The earth had suddenly split open and sucked twenty men and their women into the crack; then, freakishly, the gap had knitted together, crushing to death the cane cutters and their ammareuses.
From the surviving workers came a rumble of fear. Without waiting to free the corpses from the fissure, they scattered toward their homes, crying that Pelée had struck again.
In the Rue du Collage in St. Pierre, another crowd was running. It was in hot pursuit of a young Negro whom hunger had driven to snatch some food from a café. The owner had given chase. Others, possibly from boredom, or seeking relief from the misery of their own hunger, or just because it was a Negro being chased, had joined in. The Negro was halfway down the Rue du Collage when they caught him. He threw the stolen fish at them as he fell beneath their clubbing fists. The first sign of mob rule had come to St. Pierre.
In the Jardin des Plantes, the town’s botanical gardens, Professor Gaston Landes was contemplating the latest damage. No longer would the gardens supply Paris, Berlin, or Kew Gardens with tropical plants. The palms, ravenalas, rubber trees, giant cacti, and red hibiscus lay dead beneath a shroud a foot deep in places. The ground was littered with birds who had been choked by the fumes and gases which Pelée had poured into the atmosphere.
The destruction was a personal misfortune for Professor Landes. Later in the year, during the Lycée’s long summer vacation, he was due to sail to France with a selection of bulbs for the botanical gardens near Paris. But the bulbs, like all else in the Jardin des Plantes, were dead. The trip, financed by the Lycée, would have to be canceled. In a fit of disappointment, Professor Landes began savagely to uproot a bed of hibiscus.
The British Consul General, James Japp, was also behaving out of character this Sunday morning. He had informed his startled servant, Boverat, that for the first time since coming to the island, he would cook his own lunch.
In his room at the Lycée of St. Pierre, Professor Roger Bordier was writing a letter to his wife, convalescing in Paris after a long illness. He wrote slowly, frequently stopping to contemplate Mount Pelée, whose slopes rose from just beyond the school on the outskirts of the town. He had written to her every day since she had left the island seven months earlier. The letters were a potpourri of thesis, observation and trivia. He sent them, in bundles, on the weekly mail ship to France.
Tutor in history at the Lycée, he had come to an intriguing conclusion in the last few days. He had found a marked similarity between St. Pierre’s predicament and the destruction of Pompeii by Vesuvius in the year 79. Until now he had told no one of his theory, fearful, possibly, of ridicule from his colleagues and pupils. But to his wife he confided the link he had found. Both towns were ports of the same size. Both stood in the shadow of their volcanoes. Both had been subjected to a lengthy fallout of ash, cinders, and gases. Both had experienced earth tremors. In the case of Pompeii, destruction had been sudden and swift.
“I do not say this could happen here; yet in these days anything can occur,” wrote Professor Bordier with uncanny perception.
Only in one important fact would Pompeii differ from St. Pierre. In Pompeii nearly all the inhabitants had left the town before it was destroyed, a fact which is confirmed by the small number of bodies found in the ruins. In Pompeii no more than a thousand people died; most of the bodies that have been excavated suggest a total indifference to impending disaster.
It was the indifference of those victims that fascinated Professor Bordier; he strongly sensed its counterpart in St. Pierre now.
Professor Bordier was baffled by the people’s attitude: “They have a blind faith in the protection of the town.” But already that protective shield had been pierced time and again: “Everywhere, inside and out is covered with cinders. The floor, the furniture, it even penetrates into the drawers. When I go out into the streets, my hat is covered with ashes to a thickness of several millimeters; my alpaca vest is gray, my trousers and my shoes are the same color. In the gardens of the Lycée, the little birds hardly know on which branch to perch; the pigeons are cowering in their houses; in the yards choking hens and ducks remain in the coops. The appearance of the country is dismal. It is grayer than when it rains. In fact it is raining, only it rains ashes.”
As he wrote, his eyes were distracted by movement around Pelée’s summit. A finger of smoke had risen several hundred feet into the air above the crater. For a while it hung there, black and straight. Then, under pressure from inside the crater, the strand of smoke started to curl up on itself, flattening out at the top to form a small cloud. The cloud wavered and was then dispersed by the air currents raging around Pelée’s head.
The whole phenomenon had lasted only a few moments, but to Professor Bordier it boded ill. He calculated that the column must have contained a high proportion of solid matter to remain suspended that long in the fierce air currents; yet the pressure building up inside the crater was enormous enough to have suddenly curled up the plume into a cloud and then scattered it. To his absent wife, after describing what he had seen, Professor Bordier posed one last thought: “Who knows what will be the next phenomenon, and how will we face it?”
He sealed the letter. It would be in the last batch of mail ever to leave St. Pierre, stowed in the hold of the Italian ship Orsolina, now anchored in the roadstead off the town.
From the bridge of the French cable steamer Pouyer-Quertier, Chaptain Jules Thirion was observing the volcano and the landscape below it with care. He had sailed, under the instructions of Admiral Pierre Gourdon, Commandant of the French Naval Force of the Atlantic, from St. Lucia the previous evening. His instructions were to produce a chart of the sea bed in the area where the cable linking Martinique with Dominica was believed to have broken. It meant surveying an area from just south of the island to a point three miles north of St. Pierre. The work had started at dawn. Now the cable ship was approaching St. Pierre, a mile on its starboard side.
Down on the deck an officer of the watch supervised the essentially boring work of taking soundings and logging them. Later all the soundings would be transferred to a trace which would form the basis of the chart to be used in plotting the actual recovery of the severed cable from the ocean floor.
From the bridge of his ship, Captain Thirion watched the cloud puff over Pelée disintegrate. It had been another indication of unusual activity on the island since he had arrived. He logged it.
Seen from the sea, the island rose in a series of bold, rugged cliffs, its slopes covered with forest and fields of sugar cane. The lesser heights seemed to climb like huge camel humps until they merged with the mountain slopes of the hinterland.
The island reminded Captain Thirion of no other island he had seen: its gently swelling outline didn’t call to mind the crags and cliffs of Capri, Ischia, or any of the other Mediterranean islands he had sailed past; nor did its heights recall the nearer mountains of Cuba, Jamaica, or Puerto Rico. The landscape was uniquely that of the Lower Antilles, creating its own atmosphere, one dictated by the towering Pelée.
Through his telescope he studied St. Pierre. The twin towers of the Cathedral rose majestically above the waterfront. In the roadstead nine ships were at anchor. In the morning light the town was quiet and peaceful.
For some time now as the Pouyer-Quertier had nosed up the coast of Martinique, the sea had turned from dark blue to milky white. Now, off St. Pierre, it was a gray-white; floating in the ash was a wide variety of debris, dead animals, and human corpses.
An officer had asked if they were to try to pick up any bodies, and Captain Thirion had said they were not, because of the risk of contamination. He had instructed the lookout to give the helmsman ample warning so that he could steer clear of any carcass or corpse.
Captain Thirion was about to leave the bridge when he noticed a fresh puff of smoke being ejected from the crater. This time it shot several thousand feet into the air. Moments later another puff, larger than the first one, rocketed upward to join it. In moments a steady stream of black smut was funneling out of the volcano to form an ever growing cloud that hovered over Pelée.
Then slowly the cloud began to move, still growing, fed through the umbilical cord that linked it to the volcano.
All work on the Pouyer-Quertier stopped as the crew watched to see how this phenomenon would behave. They had not long to wait. Gathering speed every second, the cloud started to spread out over the sky like a giant black fan. In moments it was racing high over St. Pierre. It made no sound.
To Captain Thirion it was “as the twilight of an eclipse settling over the land and sea. The spectacle of the advancing ash cloud, like a huge octopus overshadowing all, caused us all to direct our gaze upward, full of fear. It seemed as if the end of the world had come. Except where illumined by the sun into a dazzling white border, its colors were a cold and forbidding gray-black. I roughly estimated the height of its course to be not less than thirty thousand feet above us, and it may have been more.”
As the cloud passed over the cable ship, the funnel of smoke linking it to Pelée’s throat died away, leaving a mass of several square miles racing across the sky.
But now, freed of its tie with the volcano, the mass appeared to be slowing down, as if it had run out of velocity. It also appeared to be losing height.
As it did so, it suddenly disgorged a shower of stones and mud. The first fragments of pumice shattered on impact on the Pouyer-Quertier’s decks, sending hot fragments flying in all directions. Several crew members were injured by the splinters. Others were singed and blistered by the hot mud.
“Acting on instinct, I ordered all speed to be made from the area,” Captain Thirion later recorded in his log.
From the safety of the bridge house he watched the last stages of the phenomenon play itself out. A couple of miles away on his port side, the giant cloud was visibly slowing down. It lingered in the sky, a black, evil mass. Then it dropped, dipping and swooping in an arc, down to the surface of the sea.
“I trained my glass on the area, unable to believe what I was witnessing. The mass sent great clouds rising from the water long after it had disappeared, and I concluded it was steam caused by the heat from the cloud,” Captain Thirion logged.
The great cloud had been no more than a curtain-raiser for what was to come.
CHAPTER NINE
The Prison Riot
THE VICAR-GENERAL saw that the cloud had brought panic to St. Pierre, and panic was something he knew how to cope with. He ordered his coach driver to make for the Place Bertin. The frightened rabble fell back as they recognized the carriage of the acting head of the island’s Church.
“Make for the center of the square,” shouted the Vicar-General, leaning from his carriage window.
His presence had a remarkable effect. Slowly the shouting and screaming died away until, in the end, the Place Bertin was totally still.
Only then did the Vicar-General step from his coach. Pulling his cape around him, he climbed up to stand beside the driver and looked out across the mass of expectant faces.
Of this moment he was later to write to his superior, the absent Bishop Alfred De Cormont: “They sought from me one thing only, reassurance. I could only think that if they sustained their faith, the Lord would protect them.”
As the Lord’s immediate representative, the Vicar-General now set about providing that reassurance and shoring up the faith that the cloud had threatened to undermine during its passage over the town.
“There is nothing to fear!” His voice, firm and strong, carried across the Place Bertin. “Look around you. There is little smoke, and what there is now blows away from the town.”
A thousand faces turned to follow the Vicar-General’s outstretched finger. It was true. The wind had suddenly veered, the first time it had done so in twenty-three days. It was now blowing north, carrying a thin trail of smoke away in the direction of Dominica.
“Let us pray,” ordered the Vicar-General. “Let us pray that God will deliver us from further evil.”
For a moment no one moved in the square. Then a man standing near the carriage dropped to his knees. The move was a signal for people all over the Place Bertin to adopt the accepted posture for prayer.
“Gloria in excelsis Deo. Et in terra pax hominibus bonne voluntatis….”
The patter of the Gloria in Excelsis carried around the square: “We praise thee, we bless thee, we adore thee, we glorify thee….”
Slowly the crowd picked up the chant: “Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam; Dominus Deus, Rex caelestis, Deus Pater omnipotens….”
To Clara Prentiss, making her way to the Cathedral for morning Mass, the chanting “was the most glorious sound I have heard.” Drawn by it, she made her way to the Place Bertin. There, on the edge of the square, she too knelt in the dust, heedless for once of the ash, to join in the worship.
“Domini Fili unigenite, Jesu Christe. Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris. Qui tollis peccata munde, miserere nobis….”
Andréus Hurard heard the chanting when he was still several streets away. He had ridden hard from Fort-de-France, eager to get back to his office. There, every Sunday morning, he composed the main editorial for Monday’s issue of Les Colonies: it was always a reflective one, looking back at the weekend which had passed, pointing up what the week might contain. Usually, he devoted the space to a political issue. But now, he had decided, the space would be best used to bring into perspective the threat of Pelée.
The sight in the Place Bertin emphasized to him “how the whole issue had been magnified. There could be no justification for such prayers.”
Dismounting from his horse, he started to lead the animal around the fringe of the crowd now coming to the end of the Gloria in Excelsis: “Tu solus Dominus, tu solus Altissimus: Jesu Christe, cum Sancto Spiritu: in gloria Dei Patris.”
The “Amen” was lost in a sudden cry: “The volcano! Look at the volcano!”
Huge cauliflower-shaped yellow clouds had started to roll out of the crater. The crowd rose from its knees, still silent, awe-struck by the spectacle. In his notebook, Andréus Hurard recorded for posterity the sight:
“We turned our eyes in the direction of Pelée, and the sight that met them was truly terrifying. The crater, peaceful until a moment ago, was hurling out wild sheets of yellow cloud. They came rolling and puffing with great fury, and in an instant the sky to the north was filled with smoke that shifted and rose, twirling itself into lofty columns and pyramids or mushroom caps—rolling black and yellow with the angry ashes that were being carried out by them. Pelée’s top was being lashed in fury by the smoke and was soon buried in the dark shadows which this new example of life in the crater had called forth. The scene was an extraordinary one, made doubly impressive by the rapidity with which it was brought about.”
The eeriness of the phenomenon was enhanced by the total absence of noise that accompanied it. In his notebook, the editor added: “Soon it became obvious to even the most timid that the clouds presented no threat.” Later, in his office, he expanded this theme for his editorial.
In his opening sentence, Hurard summed up the behavior of Pelée over the weekend. “The people of St. Pierre were treated again to a grandiose spectacle in the majesty of the smoking volcano.” He started to analyze the exact content of the ash falls, finding comfort in the fact that they contained “neither lime nor sea salt, nor any chemical substance that could be injurious to vegetation.” Turning to the damage the ash had done, he placed the blame on the weight of the falls, not on their content, adding: “While the branches of many bread trees have been broken, it must be remembered that the wood of a bread tree is of course very fragile.”
Finally he turned to one last question: “Shall we have further earthquakes? It is not probable.” For “men competent to judge” had informed the newspaper of this fact.
These men, if they existed at all outside the editor’s mind, have never been traced.
Out in the roadstead, Captain Marino Leboffe of the Orsolina had come to a decision. He would, if necessary, sail with his holds empty rather than risk being engulfed.
There was silence in his cabin as he announced the decision.
The Orsolina was one of four Italian ships riding at anchor off St. Pierre. There was the Teresa Lo Vico, a wooden bark of 585 tons, waiting to take on board a cargo of sugar from the Guérin refinery. Another bark, the 580-ton Sacro Cuore, had just arrived from Marseilles with a mixed cargo. The Nord America, a 583-ton bark, was waiting to load a mixed cargo from the Clerc warehouses.
