The Day the World Ended by Gordon Thomas

Author:Gordon Thomas [Thomas, Gordon; Witts, Max Morgan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5880-6
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Great Wave

FROM A POINT near the top of Mount Verte, Father Alte Roche had watched the avalanche of mud bury his theory that Pelée presented no threat. In a few moments a wide brown swath had stained the patchwork of swamps, streams, and jungle below him. It had obliterated the Blanche River, the sugar cane fields on either side of it, and the defenses erected upstream to prevent flooding, as well as the refinery itself. All that remained visible of the building was the tip of its eighty-foot chimney stack, held up by two of its original eight cables. It was still smoking.

The moments of devastation were clearly imprinted on the Jesuit’s mind: “Hardly had the midday hour passed on this Monday when the gates of the volcano were drawn and a flood of boiling mud was sent hurling down the mountainside to be flung from it into the sea. In three minutes it had covered its last three miles to the ocean, and within that time it had left nothing visible of the Guérin refinery but the chimney—a post projecting from a desert of black boiling and seething mud. The factory had stood as a symbol for what it represented through long years of toil and conquest. Now it had disappeared as if the hand of the Devil had covered it.”

From his vantage point, looking out across the grand-bois to the source of the Blanche River, Father Roche could clearly see where the mud had begun its journey of destruction: it was still pouring out—”like pus from an infected wound”—from a huge hole in the side of the volcano. Blocks of rock estimated by Father Roche to “weigh as much as fifty tons” had burst out of the side of the volcano.

Looking down on the disaster area, Father Roche estimated the “depth of the mud in some parts of its flow was probably not less than 150 feet. By the time it had reached the coastline, it had spread to cover a distance of nearly a mile. Nothing moved in the area.”

But now a new terror was building up. The mud was driving the sea farther and farther offshore. The water, fighting to resist the huge pressures, was rearing higher and higher into the air.

On the bridge of the Pouyer-Quertier, by now three miles offshore, Captain Jules Thirion could not believe what he saw through his telescope. The coast was disappearing behind a wall of water.

From the deck hands came shouts of “Tidal wave! Tidal wave!”

But in all his experience Captain Thirion had never known a tidal wave that rose out of the surf close to the shore. Though the difference would matter little to its victims, it was in fact a shock wave and not related to the tides.

At that moment smoke, thick and gray, started to pour from Pelée’s throat. It hung in the still air, then drifted down on the countryside. From her bedroom window Suzette Lavenière watched the billowing smoke roll over the countryside.

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