The Angry Mountain (26 page)

“Done with what?” I asked.

He drove his fist into my face. “The other rotor arm, you fool.”

“I haven't got it,” I mumbled through my broken lips. “Maxwell has it.” I thought the He might send him back to them and give them another chance.

He beat at my face with his clenched fist until the mountain flamed again. Then he dived for the door of the roof and disappeared. I heard bolts being shot home and then I was alone in the red glare of the mountain.

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 clothes-line, 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 lava 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 …

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.

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.

The crack widened steadily—a foot, two feet. Then the farther half of the roof split into fragments and folded inwards, sinking down towards the lava in a heat blast of dust. And as it fell I saw the stone housing of the doorway disintegrate.

I scrambled towards it. It was a chance in a million. Through the choking dust I saw the wooden stairs intact leading down to the room below. I hesitated. I think any one would rather die in the open than be caught like a rat in a trap inside a building. But it was still a chance and I
took it. I swung myself over the edge, dropped on to one foot and jumped the whole length of the stairs. I landed in a heap on the boards of the room below. The farther wall was missing and through it I could see the heat curling up from the top of the lava.

The stone staircase, thank God, was behind me. I scrambled to the top and slithered down. On the second flight I almost broke my arm as I fell against the side of the archway at the bottom. I could feel the building trembling now and the room I was in was full of a vicious, suffocating heat.

As I picked myself up I saw through the choking dust clouds, a long face with ears twitching and eyes rolling. It was the poor wretched mule, lashing out with its legs as it strained at the halter that held it. A long-bladed butcher's knife lay on the floor. I grabbed it, hopped over to the animal and slashed it free. I had a childish fear that if I let the creature die, I should die too.

God knows why I did it. Some pilot's instinct, I suppose, to have a mascot. But the mule was nearly the death of me. It leapt free and ran careering and screaming round the room, hoofs lashing and teeth grinding in its fear. Then it found the ramp and went thundering down, slithering the last part on its haunches. I was so close behind it that I saw the sparks kicked up by its hooves as it pawed itself to its feet at the bottom.

Those ramps were easier than the stone stairs. They were slimy with dung and I slithered down them, lying on my back and thrusting myself forward with my hands. I could feel the building rocking as I descended and at each floor I could see the burning face of the lava where the farther wall had once been. As I reached the ground floor there was a series of splintering crashes and I knew the house was disintegrating above my head. The way to the street, the way the cattle had been brought in, was gone and in the ragged gap I saw the white heat of the lava face and felt the scorching breath of it singe my hair.

The mule had gone out by a window, crashing through it and taking the whole frame with it in its terror. I followed and as I fell to the ground I realised I was in the garden of the house and there lying almost beside me was my leg.

It was one of those strokes of luck that fate is kind enough to offer once in a while and looking back on it I can't help having an instinctive feeling that it was all because I paused to free the mule. I know it sounds stupid. But there it is. We had odder beliefs than that when we were flying night after night over Germany.

I picked up the dented limb, hopped to the wall and scrambled over. And as I fell into the next garden, the house I'd been imprisoned in disintegrated, filling the narrow space between the houses with noise and dust. I got through the next house and came out into a narrow street that was blocked at one end by the lava. The place was a cul-de-sac, and there was my mule, standing at the end of it with his face to the lava and whinnying.

I dropped my trousers and strapped the leg in place. The lava grit embedded in the stump of my leg hurt like hell when I put my weight on it. But I didn't care. It was such a relief to be able to stand upright like a human being again. It's a horrible feeling to have only one leg and to be forced to crawl around like the lower order of creatures. To stand upright again and move normally gave me a sudden surge of confidence and for the first time that morning I felt I might win out in the end.