Ajani fell backwards and hit his head on the floor. He pulled himself erect and reeled to the little cubicle in which he kept his equipment. Here he vomited so forcefully that the whole world seemed to shake and swirl. He passed out into a coma deep enough to block out the shrilling of the hospital’s fire alarms and the bustle of rushing feet. During the time he was unconscious, the building was evacuated. All the patients assembled, in beds and wheelchairs as necessary, in the car park outside, well away from every danger of the molten lava except for the sulphurous stench of it. Here they waited expectantly for help. But the flawlessly executed procedure proved useless. For Karisoke was joined by Lac Dudo in another grim little joke.
The floor of the lake, like the floor of the caldera high above it, was hollow. Beneath a thin crust on its southern side was a chamber, sealed for centuries. This did not contain magma but a range of gases, mostly consisting of carbon dioxide but also hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide. As the caldera emptied, pouring lava past the lake’s eastern shore, so the bubble burst. The southern section of the lake — far away from Dr Kuozomi’s oyster beds — boiled fiercely for several minutes as millions of cubic metres of gas burst up into the air. It rolled in an invisible cloud down the hillside beside the lava, also guided by the various folds of the mountain’s topography — and, indeed, that of the valley at its foot where the city lay trapped in a deep depression. It flooded into the western suburbs of the city that the molten rock had left untouched. Heavier than air, it swept into the streets and buildings in an invisible wall five stories high. It filled rooms, apartments, corridors, ventilation systems and lift shafts. It flooded into basements and tunnels. It filled the city’s once-vaunted underground train system. It washed through the south-western suburbs and out on to the farmland that clothed the foothills of the next mountain range, then, dammed there, it washed back and settled. It filled the streets and parks, the gardens and the open spaces. It filled the car park where the patients, doctors and nurses were waiting and smothered them all in moments. Everywhere it went it snuffed out life as efficiently as if the entire area had become one huge shower stall in Auschwitz.
So that, although he never knew it, Ajani was the last man left alive in Cite La Bas when he came staggering out of his tiny cubicle and started to look around. The fire alarms were still ringing. The air-conditioning was still wheezing. The lights and signs were all still illuminated. Ajani knew the procedure well enough. If the alarms were on, the lifts were out of bounds. But the thought of going down the twenty-four flights of stairs that would take him down twelve stories was more than the staggering man could contemplate. He hit the button on the nearest lift, therefore, and leaned against the wall, listening as the car wheezed asthmatically up towards him. Apart from that mechanical gasping and the shrilling of the alarm, the whole place — the whole city — seemed silent. Ajani decided that as soon as he reached the ground floor he would check out the pharmacy. With any luck he would be able to get his hands on more drugs. From the look of things there would be a ready market for anything he could steal. Though The Ahia was, like the airport, somewhere under whatever had come blazing down the mountainside.
The door hissed open. Ajani stepped in and hit the ground-floor button. The door slithered closed. Ajani looked at his reflection in the mirror on the back wall. His eyes were watering, he noted with some surprise. Then he noticed that his adenoids were burning. His nostrils twitched strongly enough to make the scars of his tribal Poro initiation writhe like snakes beneath the skin of his cheeks. Abruptly it seemed as though the whole area behind his nose was prickling uncomfortably. He sneezed; dragged his hand down over his face. Sneezed again and gasped. Abruptly, he realized his throat was hurting also. He frowned, shaking his head. Perhaps he had picked something up, he thought. The other cleaners were always getting infections from the wards and the patients. Ajani never had — perhaps because the medications he took were strong enough to keep everything else at bay, along with the pain. He looked over his shoulder. The lift was at the fifth floor. Not long now, he thought dreamily. But the pain in his throat had spread with unexpected swiftness into his chest and he was suddenly finding it hard to catch his breath.
Then, between floors five and four, the lift stopped, so abruptly that Ajani fell to his knees. Damn, he thought. Now I’ll have to call for help. That means I won’t be able to get to the pharmacy so easily. He reached up for the alarm button but he couldn’t quite reach it. He took firm hold of the handrail which ran at waist height round the car and started to pull himself up. Only to find, with some surprise, that he no longer had the strength to do so.
A sudden realization stabbed through him. He might be in really serious trouble here. He sucked in a good lungful of air to call for help, but all he could do was cough and choke. He gathered his knees up to his chin and hugged them as hard as he could. The whole of his torso seemed to be on fire. Like the volcano Karisoke, burning wildly on the inside. He never really understood that he was being smothered by poison gases. Hardly even registered, in his dreamy, drugged-up state, that he was dying. The lights went out and a huge, dark silence seemed to close over him like the waters of the strange black lake so close to where he had slaughtered the Japanese workers so long ago.
Then, a decade later, the rains came. Torrential, unrelenting, month after month. In a vicious meteorological irony, all the areas of East Africa where huge populations tried to scratch a living were almost totally destroyed by drought. But on the empty and forsaken forests surrounding the Central African mountain chain that is the headwater of the great River Gir — which fed the black lake — five years’ rainfall tore down in less than a month. There were mudslides on Karisoke’s upper slopes powerful enough to tear down even the deserted virgin jungle. More huge trees joined the monster beside which Mizuki’s bones lay. The wide black path of the lava flow — as slick as a highway two kilometres wide even after a decade — was transformed into a wild torrent. Great rocks tore the lower sections into a black moonscape. The deserted, half-buried ruin of Cite La Bas was briefly flooded. And Lac Dudo burst its banks.
As well as his precious orchidarium, Dr Koizumi had overseen the construction of a series of dams and sluices to protect his priceless oysters and the black pearls he hoped they would bear to enrich the ill-fated Yakimoto Freshwater Pearl Company, which had employed him and sent him and his little team out here to seed the black lake with Japanese Biwa oysters. But they were no match for floods such as these. As the lake burst free of its natural boundaries, so it burst out of the doctor’s system as well. The raging torrent tore away the reed bed through which Mizuki had fled, and uncovered the grinning skull which was all that was left of Dr Koizumi. The flood rolled the skull like a boulder into the ruined orchidarium where the precious plants had continued to blossom untended through all those years. It swept them on to a black-foaming crest and washed them on to a bed of water hyacinth.
But the power of the deluge was so massive that it ripped away the floor of the lake as easily as it tore free some of the plant-choked surface, so that Dr Koizumi’s skull was joined on the floating bed of hyacinth not only by his beloved orchids but also by a dozen or more of his huge black pearl-rich oysters. And that bed of hyacinth, a thickly woven mat of stems and roots almost as big as a barge, stayed coherent as it was swept down into the river system that the waters from the black lake fed. Miraculously, the orchids, the oysters and the skull remained wedged in place as the hyacinth barge slid over waterfalls and cataracts, through races and rapids until it sailed safely out on to the broad stream of the main river. The river that was the life’s blood of Benin La Bas, the great River Gir.