No fishing boats set sail that hot summer morning. There was no wind. The sea lay dead and calm, as though oil had been poured upon the waters. It was a purple gray, suave and beautiful, but when Kino looked at it he felt afraid.
“Why is the sea such a color?” he asked.
“Sea mirrors sky,” his father replied. “Sea and earth and sky — if they work together against man, it will be dangerous indeed for us.”
“Where are the gods at such a time?” Kino asked. “Will they not be mindful of us?”
“There are times when the gods leave man to take care of himself,” his father replied. “They test us, to see how able we are to save ourselves.”
“And if we are not able?” Kino asked.
“We must be able,” his father replied. “Fear alone makes man weak. If you are afraid, your hands tremble, your feet falter, and your brain cannot tell hands and feet what to do.”
No one stirred from home that day. Kino’s father sat at the door, watching the sky and the oily sea, and Kino stayed near him. He did not know what Jiya was doing, but he imagined that Jiya, too, stayed by his father. So the hours passed until noon.
At noon his father pointed down the mountainside. “Look at Old Gentleman’s castle,” he said.
Halfway down the mountainside on the knoll where the castle stood, Kino now saw a red flag rise slowly to the top of a tall pole and hang limp against the gray sky.
“Old Gentleman is telling everyone to be ready,” Kino’s father went on. “Twice have I seen that flag go up, both times before you were born.”
“Be ready for what?” Kino asked in a frightened voice.
“For whatever happens,” Kino’s father replied.
At two o’clock the sky began to grow black. The air was as hot as though a forest fire were burning, but there was no sign of such a fire. The glow of the volcano glared over the mountaintop, blood-red against the black. A deep-toned bell tolled over the hills.
“What is that bell?” Kino asked his father. “I never heard it before.”
“It rang twice before you were born,” his father replied. “It is the bell in the temple inside the walls of Old Gentleman’s castle. He is calling the people to come up out of the village and shelter within his walls.”
“Will they come?” Kino asked.
“Not all of them,” his father replied. “Parents will try to make their children go, but the children will not want to leave their parents. Mothers will not want to leave fathers, and the fathers will stay by their boats. But some will want to be sure of life.”
The bell kept on ringing urgently, and soon out of the village a trickling stream of people, nearly all of them children, began to climb toward the knoll.
“I wish Jiya would come,” Kino said. “Do you think he will see me if I stand on the edge of the terrace and wave my white girdle cloth?”
“Try it,” his father said.
“Come with me,” Kino begged.
So Kino and his father stood on the edge of the terrace and waved. Kino took off the strip of white cloth from about his waist that he wore instead of a belt, and he waved it, holding it in both hands, high above his head.
Far down the hill Jiya saw the two figures and the waving strip of white against the dark sky. He was crying as he climbed, and trying not to cry. He had not wanted to leave his father, but because he was the youngest one, his older brother and his father and mother had all told him that he must go up the mountain. “We must divide ourselves,” Jiya’s father said. “If the ocean yields to the fires you must live after us.”
“I don’t want to live alone,” Jiya said.
“It is your duty to obey me, as a good Japanese son,” his father told him.
Jiya had run out of the house, crying. Now when he saw Kino, he decided that he would go there instead of to the castle, and he began to hurry up the hill to the farm. Next to his own family he loved Kino’s strong father and kind mother. He had no sister of his own and he thought Setsu was the prettiest girl he had ever seen.
Kino’s father put out his hand to help Jiya up the stone wall and Kino was just about to shout out his welcome when suddenly a hurricane wind broke out of the ocean. Kino and Jiya clung together and wrapped their arms about the father’s waist.
“Look — look — what is that?” Kino screamed.
The purple rim of the ocean seemed to lift and rise against the clouds. A silver-green band of bright sky appeared like a low dawn above the sea.
“May the gods save us,” Kino heard his father mutter. The castle bell began to toll again, deep and pleading. Ah, but would the people hear it in the roaring wind? Their houses had no windows toward the sea. Did they know what was about to happen?
Under the deep waters of the ocean, miles down under the cold, the earth had yielded at last to the fire. It groaned and split open and the cold water fell into the middle of the boiling rocks. Steam burst out and lifted the ocean high into the sky in a big wave. It rushed toward the shore, green and solid, frothing into white at its edges. It rose, higher and higher, lifting up hands and claws.
“I must tell my father!” Jiya screamed.
But Kino’s father held him fast with both arms. “It is too late,” he said sternly.
And he would not let Jiya go.
In a few seconds, before their eyes the wave had grown and come nearer and nearer, higher and higher. The air was filled with its roar and shout. It rushed over the flat still waters of the ocean and before Jiya could scream again it reached the village and covered it fathoms deep in swirling wild water, green laced with fierce white foam. The wave ran up the mountainside, until the knoll where the castle stood was an island. All who were still climbing the path were swept away — black, tossing scraps in the wicked waters. The wave ran up the mountain until Kino and Jiya saw the wavelets curl at the terrace walls upon which they stood. Then with a great sucking sigh, the wave swept back again, ebbing into the ocean, dragging everything with it, trees and stones and houses. They stood, the man and the two boys, utterly silent, clinging together, facing the wave as it went away. It swept back over the village and returned slowly again to the ocean, subsiding, sinking into a great stillness.
Upon the beach where the village stood not a house remained, no wreckage of wood or fallen stone wall, no little street of shops, no docks, not a single boat. The beach was as clean of houses as if no human beings had ever lived there. All that had been was now no more.
Jiya gave a wild cry and Kino felt him slip to the ground. He was unconscious. What he had seen was too much for him. What he knew, he could not bear. His family and his home were gone.
Kino began to cry and Kino’s father did not stop him. He stooped and gathered Jiya into his arms and carried him into the house, and Kino’s mother ran out of the kitchen and put down a mattress and Kino’s father laid Jiya upon it.
“It is better that he is unconscious,” he said gently. “Let him remain so until his own will wakes him. I will sit by him.”
“I will rub his hands and feet,” Kino’s mother said sadly.
Kino could say nothing. He was still crying and his father let him cry for a while. Then he said to his wife:
“Heat a little rice soup for Kino and put some ginger in it. He feels cold.”
Now Kino did not know until his father spoke that he did feel cold. He was shivering and he could not stop crying. Setsu came in. She had not seen the big wave, for her mother had closed the windows and drawn the curtains against the sea. But now she saw Jiya lying white-pale and still.
“Is Jiya dead?” she asked.
“No, Jiya is living,” her father replied.
“Why doesn’t he open his eyes?” she asked again.
“Soon he will open his eyes,” the father replied.