The fall of stones ceased as abruptly as it had begun. I gave Hilda one of the rotor arms. ‘See if you can find the others,’ I told her. ‘I’m going after him.’
‘Why not let him go?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He may be the only one who can lead us to your father. I must try and stop him. You get the others.’
I left the shelter of the archway then and crossed the courtyard. ‘Please be careful,’ she called after me. I floundered in the sifting surface of ash. It made my leg very difficult to handle. The sound of my feet on the clear paving stones of the main archway seemed unnaturally loud. Then I was out in the street. I could see the piazza with its pump and the cart lying drunkenly on its broken wheel. The ash was pitted by the fall of stones as though there had been a brief shower of heavy rain. Not a living thing moved in all that street. It was as though a grey desert had moved in and destroyed all life.
I turned then and looked back up the narrow rise of the street. Sansevino was standing in the middle of the road, quite still, his back towards me. He was staring up the street and I saw why he’d stopped. It was a truly terrifying sight. The road was narrow like a cutting between the sheer walls of the houses. But instead of going up out of the village into the open vineyards of the mountain slopes, that street ceased abruptly in a great wall that towered as high as the houses. In the lurid glow the narrow cut seemed choked with an enormous coke pile.
There was a sudden shifting sound as the coke spilled forward and as it spilled a white molten glare filled the end of the street. The house fronts flickered with light, their faces seeming to be twisted in agony as they saw their doom, and a blast of furnace-hot air ran down the shaft of the street, blistering hot and chokingly sulphurous. Then the light died as the outer surface of the lava-spill cooled.
Sansevino turned and started down towards me. I was so astonished by the sight of the lava that I did nothing. I just stood there in the middle of the street and watched him trying to run towards me, his right side twisted with pain. He didn’t see me for a moment. When he did he stopped. He had the startled, frightened look of a thing trapped. He gave one glance over his shoulder at the spilling face of the lava and dived into the open doorway of a house.
If he’d had a gun he could have shot me down from the shelter of that doorway. But he hadn’t got a gun. His gun was lying in the villa, one bullet in Roberto’s body, the others embedded in the floorboards. As I followed him through the doorway where he’d disappeared there was a crumbling sound and I saw one of the houses at the end of the street topple into the lava stream in a cloud of mortar dust.
The building was very dark after the glare of the street. It smelt of garbage and earth closets. Dusty windows gave the shadows a reddish gleam. I listened. I could hear no sound but the distant gaseous hiss of the crater. He wasn’t climbing the stairs. Either he was waiting in the shadows for me or else he had gone straight through the building. I switched on my torch. The beam showed stone steps leading upwards. A passageway led past these to the back of the house. The stone floor was worn smooth and deep by the footsteps of many generations. It led to a back room. There was a big double bed with huge Birmingham brass knobs, an old chest of drawers and a table supported at one corner by a packing case. The place was littered with household things all mixed up with straw on which animals had been bedded. The door on the other side stood open.
It led to a small patch of ground backed by a low wall and then more houses. And in the ash that covered the garden I saw the track of a man’s feet. I followed them, over the stone wall, to the back of the next row of houses. They ended at the steps to a balcony. The balcony was arched with pillars of stone. Stone steps led upwards from one corner and down the funnel of the stairs I heard the sound of footsteps climbing.
I followed. At each floor there was a balcony with stone arches and as I climbed higher the arches became blacker as they stood out against the lava glow. At each balcony I caught a glimpse of rooms that had suddenly been vacated. The panic litter of clothes and household things bore dumb witness to the haste with which the occupants had fled. At last I reached the top floor. A wooden ladder ascended to the roof. I switched my torch off and went cautiously up, gripping the tiny automatic in my hand.
The roof when I reached it looked red hot. It was quite flat and as my head emerged through the trap-door I saw Sansevino not fifty feet away, his body a black silhouette against a huge flow of lava that ringed Santo Francisco to the west. He was climbing the low balustrade to the next house. I followed him, running as best I could on the treacherous surface of loose ash. I glanced up to my right and saw the mountain leaning over me. The great welts of the lava flow streamed down towards the village. There were four flows — one reaching down to the houses, one to the west and two of the east. And over it all was_the red, roaring mass of the crater column of gas like an oil gusher that has been fired. Looking up at the incredible sight I trod on a stone and fell with my face in the ash. I think it was the ash that saved me from hurting myself. I spat it out of my mouth and got to my feet, rubbing my eyes.
Sansevino had reached the end of the block now. I saw him hesitate at the edge and turn back. Then he disappeared into a doorway. The stump of my leg was beginning to ache and a piece of ash had got into my left eye, hurting damnably. The filthy stuff was in my mouth, too, and as I clenched my teeth against the pain of my eye they gritted unpleasantly.
I reached the doorway where Sansevino had disappeared and stumbled through. There was a ladder like the one I’d come up. And then I was descending through stone arched balconies, hearing Sansevino’s footsteps clattering ahead of me. I nearly slipped on a patch of oil — olive oil spilled from a big pottery jar that someone had dropped on the steps.
At the bottom we came out into a garden full of stunted orange trees, the fruit glowing like little Chinese lanterns. I followed his footsteps to another row of houses, taller this time and in bad repair with the plaster hanging in great mouldering slabs. Here were big rooms littered with beds on bare wooden boards. Many people had slept and lived and kept their livestock in those overcrowded, dirty rooms. An old stone archway led in from the shadow of a narrow street that smelt of rotting garbage and in the far corner of one of the rooms I found a narrow ramp running up to the floor above. It was cobbled and ridged with stone. I could hear Sansevino climbing above me and I followed.
The ramp was slippery with manure and smelt of horses. With the beam of my torch lighting the way I struggled up to the floor above and then to the next. Here a gaunt, big-boned mule stared at me with rolling, frightened eyes and wisps of straw hanging from its sulky mouth. It twitched its long ears in the light of the torch, laid them back and looked as wicked as hell.
The ramp finished there, but stone steps led on upwards. I was beginning to feel very tired — a combination of nervous exhaustion, lack of sleep and the ache in the stump of my leg. I stumbled and the tin of my leg clanked against the stone where the treads had been worn into two deep little hollows. I thought of all the people who had climbed up and down those stairs every day of their lives. Generation after generation of them. Parts of these old houses had probably been in constant occupation for well over a thousand years, and in a few hours they would be wiped off the face of the earth.