Portent (41 page)

    It was then that the very ground began to moan. A donkey grazing beneath the shade of the trees raised its old dusty head, then spread its legs as if bracing itself. The noises from the earth faded and everyone was very still and very quiet. The old woman deftly touched her forehead, chest and shoulders with her thumb, the self-blessing a protection against the horror she suspected was to come. The moaning resumed, this time instigating wails of fear among the tremulous peasants. One of them broke away, an idiot son of an idiot father, and ran for the dirt-track that was the olive grove's only access, but the others were weakened by their own fright and could only watch as shrubs and trees began to move from their roots. The ground rose and fell in orderly furrows like the waves of the sea. Now they screamed and the donkey brayed as they lost their balance and fell. A fissure opened beneath them and several of them plunged into it. Trees leant precariously, their roots exposed and those in line with the fissure plunged into its jaws only to be spat out again on scalding geysers of gaseous mud, for the rupture had tapped into deep springs of boiling water.

    The tremors spread throughout the three provinces and the earth erupted, releasing more springs and blistering mud. Before long the entire region was moist from rolling steam mists.

    The tornado hit the capital city of Kansas in the early hours of the morning just as the state assembly was gathering for its emergency debate on the UFOs that had been clearly sighted here, there and everywhere over the territory for two consecutive nights. The building was hurriedly evacuated as the storms tore in and the Kansas National Guard stood by on full alert, not to help the worthy citizens, but to prevent looting from the damaged stores and private dwellings once the worst had passed. It was not a single tornado that swept through the Midwest, but a series of them, all wreaking their own separate havoc and demolition, one flattening a whole caravan park, another destroying the hospital wing of a military base, all of them carrying people, lampposts, hoardings, cars-anything caught out in the open-hundreds of feet into the air, wrecking the less sturdy buildings, sweeping away livestock and turning rivers, some of which had almost run dry, into raging torrents.

    As well as Kansas, the winds and rain roared through Oklahoma, Nebraska and Louisiana, deadly swathes of destruction that for the time being obliterated all thoughts of weird flying lights and strange encounters.

    

    

    While the citizens of Tokyo observed the three mystic lights that had appeared in the cloudy night sky over the city, nineteen miles below them a part of the Earth's crust was shifting dramatically. The shockwave that rose to the surface was equal to thirty Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosions. Great chasms opened up in the roads, trains were derailed, and thousands of panic-stricken people were killed or maimed by falling masonry, glass and even water tanks (mercifully, the newer buildings of the city had been built to absorb and withstand the worst of tremors, so damage to property was limited) or crushed by the fleeing hordes. But it was the fires caused by broken gas pipes, oil storage tanks, Calor gas heaters, vehicle petrol tanks and cooking stoves that inflicted the worst damage.

    Soon the shanty slums of Hongo were ablaze, as was the Shitamachi area of the city, whose narrow lanes of wooden houses fed the hungry fires so that they spread and merged with those of other districts. It wasn't long before a huge wall of flame was moving through the city and many of the people were forced to leap into ponds and rivers. And so were boiled alive.

    

    

    The procession made its way up the mountainside towards the advancing lava flow. The people from the village chanted their hymns while at their head four of the menfolk concentrated on keeping the statue of the Madonna upright on its makeshift wooden platform. The route was winding and arduous, but Zafferana's priest resolutely led them onwards. Hundreds of mines detonated by the Italian military, aided by the US Marine Corps, had failed to redirect the lava flow and even the two-ton concrete blocks carefully placed by American helicopters were unable to divert the unremitting advance. Padre Giuseppe Pacello, however, was undaunted, for faith-and holy statues-had stemmed the burning tide's advance twice before in years gone by. Mongibello (the mountain of mountains) was the villagers' name for Mount Etna and less than a decade before the white-hot lava from openings in its rugged slopes had stopped only metres away from the first few houses. The Blessed Virgin had saved them then and on another occasion, and so would she this time. Much of the chestnut woods and orchards further up was already covered by pulsing black molten rock and the smell of sulphur was so thick and pungent that the children and old folk, whose lungs could not cope with such pervasion, had been evacuated to other places far away from the danger zone.

    They halted just twenty feet from the oozing lava, hands shielding their faces from the hot glow, and followed their priest's example by dropping to their knees on the stony track. They sang the Lord's and His Virgin Mother's praises, voices swelling with emotion, eyes shining with desperation. It had taken the flow a matter of weeks to reach this point after the initial eruption, the fastest advance in their recorded history, and they knew their homes would be threatened within days. Padre Giuseppe indicated that the Madonna should be placed alone between his flock and the lava and, their backs turned towards the heat, the four men shuffled forward to set down their burden a mere ten feet from the flow. Bushes nearby burst into flames as the men retreated. Now the priest urged his people to pray even harder for their salvation, and this they did with vigour and fortitude, some of them covering their mouths with handkerchiefs and scarves against the acrid stench, others edging to the back so that their companions' bodies would protect them from the worst of the heat. Together they beseeched their Lord and His Mother for divine intervention.

    The statue of the Madonna began to blacken. Its face grew dark, the hands, held palms outwards in supplication, began to crack. Wisps of smoke began to rise from the wooden platform. But the miracle they prayed for started to happen. Or so they thought.

    The tiny halo appeared over the head of the Madonna, a white radiance whose centre resembled a round communion wafer. Now the eyes of the farmers and villagers shone with joy and wonder and their mouths opened in silent cries of adoration. The priest raised his face to the heavens that at present were soiled with smoke and ash, for here before them was the sign they had been waiting for. Zafferana and the land around it would be saved!

    He was stretching his arms towards the blackened sky in gratitude when the Madonna disappeared before them. But this was no mystery, for the ground had opened up without warning, without even a sound or a trembling of the earth, and swallowed the statue and platform whole. The bright halo light, however, remained where it was. Until a jet of white-hot lava spewed from the newly created hole and consumed the light as it rose high into the air.

    The people of Zafferana and their priest scuttled back down the mountainside, but very few escaped the searing rain of fire that fell from the terrible burning fountain. And the lava moved doggedly onwards towards the village.

    

    

    They had flocked there from the village to see for themselves the little star that flittered over the big brown lake. It was mud and iron hydroxide that stained the surface of the normally blue Lake Nyos during this part of the season, but the villagers were unconcerned with such explanations, preferring to believe that the waters had grown old and weary with the passing of the year and were about to die only to be reborn, fresh and clear, when the days grew cooler. That phenomenon had been witnessed many times, but this god-light had never played a part in the rebirth before. They pointed at the light as it flitted here and there and they jabbered and nudged each other excitedly. The word spread and their numbers swelled to 2,000 or more as others heard the tale and journeyed to its source. They uttered a great collective sigh as a bubbling and belching breath emanated from the lake, then cried and held their noses when a white cloud smelling of rotten eggs rose from the depths. An ever-widening ripple swept towards the shore and those at the water's edge stepped back in fright.

    The light was faint and ghost-like through the mist that drifted towards them. The cloud soon enveloped them where they stood and they began to feel a warmness spread through them; one by one, men, women and children, they began to fall to the ground as a pleasant drowsiness overcame them. They were not to know that the gases, which included carbon dioxide, had seeped into the water from below, for the lake occupied what had once been a volcanic crater. Those gases remained at the bottom of the lake, trapped in the cooler water there, to be released during the monsoon season when cooling surface water sank to the bottom and displaced the now warmer water which, along with the gases it contained, rose to the top.

    They weren't to know this, nor did those few who survived wish to hear it, for they preferred to believe that the Death Star had visited their people and warned them to mend their ways. No one could tell those left alive that they were wrong in this, and not too many tried.

    

    

    … And so it continued, throughout the day and throughout the night, upheavals that would irrevocably change the planet's environment. California's San Andreas fault finally lived up to its full and lethal promise, the golden state tom asunder from Cape Mendocino to Imperial Valley, destroying the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as Daly City, Hollister and Bakersfield. A tidal wave hit Osaka in Japan, not even its sophisticated system of storm barriers saving the port city from devastation; another tsunami, caused by seismic faulting on the sea floor, swamped the Hawaiian island of Oahu, the waves returning again and again until not one building or tree on Kawela Bay was left standing. Another convulsion beneath the sea, this one in the English Channel, fractured the long and much-troubled tunnel rail link between England and France, causing the deaths of hundreds as they travelled through on high-speed trains. Hurricanes swept along the whole chain of Leeward and Windward Islands, the worst damage rendered to Antigua and Barbuda; storms also tore through Cuba, flattening buildings and vegetation, killing people and animals in their thousands. Earthquakes rocked Armenia,

    Iran, Afghanistan, Thailand, Indonesia, Peru, Chile and, more surprisingly, South Africa and Madagascar. Chicago and the Pyrenean village of Rebenacq were pummelled by hailstones as big as footballs, while Yellowstone Park's Mount Jackson shrugged off thousands of tons of rock in dusty torrents in the aftershock following a tremor that shook the whole state of Montana. Three mountain islands rose from the depths of the Indian Ocean, their emergence causing tidal waves along the southern tip of India, Sri Lanka and Somalia. Mount St. Helen's, never entirely dormant after its last eruption only a few years before, shot a blast of ash-filled steam and gas into the air at a speed of 700 miles per hour, snapping off trees from its slopes to scatter them like straws over a vast area, while a molten lava stream arced from the side of Hawaii's Kilauea volcano into the sea before the entire top of the open mountain sank into its own bubbling centre. A volcano in Iceland known as Laki tore open a thirty-mile-long fissure, lava pouring from it into the Skafta River, replacing water with molten rock that overflowed the river valley; twenty miles wide, the lava moved on at incredible speed, filling a large lake and two other river valleys, melting huge quantities of glacial ice which flooded the land, the steam created causing torrential rain that contributed to the flooding.

    In many regions the sky was full of lightning and thunder, bolts strafing the air, joining earth to cloud with numerous simultaneous streaks. New York's Empire State Building was struck no less than sixty-five times during a single hour-long thunderstorm; eleven sightseers on an observation platform in one of Kenya's game parks were hit by lightning, six of them killed instantly, the others burned severely; a hole was melted through a bell inside a church tower in Ohio; in Ireland potatoes were cooked in their fields; many fires were started in forests all over the world, particularly in Canada, and a great ring of fire threatened the city of Sydney, Australia, and its suburbs when lightning set the surrounding woodlands ablaze. Lightning penetrated a reserve fuel tank in the wing of a 747 jetliner over Miami, igniting the vapours and sending the aeroplane plummeting; all passengers and crew were killed. An immense ethereal aurora appeared over Canada's Yukon Territory and auroral fires lit up Alaska's skies, their colours a beautiful blue-green merging to purple and mauve. High above Kiruna in Sweden, the northern lights swirled in a spectral 'folded ribbon' shape of blues, greens and indigos, and this during sombre daylight hours.

    Tremendous gushers of boiling water burst through the ground everywhere, many of them in the unlikeliest, if not impossible, places: towering geysers erupted in Africa's Sahara and Namib Deserts as well as in Monument Valley and the Sonoran Desert, Arizona; geysers sprang from the Bandee Amir lakes 10,000 feet above sea level in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan as well as from the limestone plateau in Chad's Tibesti Massif: smaller, but no less impressive, springs bubbled from the almost dry Valley of Antarctica, while giant geysers appeared in the Thar Desert in north-west India and the bleak Denakil Depression of northeastern Ethiopia; others, some as high as 380 feet, appeared in Australia's Gibson and Great Victoria Deserts, at the edge of China's Altyn Tagh range and the Taklimakan Desert in the Sinkiang Province. In these places and countless others the great geysers jetted into the air, each of them having the power to change the environment and the quality of the land around them.