When evening came, Claudine was rattling about the kitchen. Denise and I were enjoying daiquiris on the verandah; any liquor but rum is sky-high in Martinique. We were admiring the blaze of the hibiscus and bouganvillia, sniffing the aroma of a million blossoms, and watching the lizards scuttle, when the drumming began.
It was a dry, metallic tap-tap-tappety-tap, as if someone were hitting an empty kerosene can. It did not seem to come from any particular direction. I wondered if some of the locals had gotten up a steel band, on the Trinidadian model, and were practicing on their tuned oil drums.
Jacques came out on the porch to tell us that dinner was ready. The he froze, bug-eyed and slack-mouthed. If he could have turned pale, I am sure he would have.
"Come on, Jacques!" I said.
"Those drums," he said, almost in a whisper. "That is the deed of Monsieur Duchamps."
"Eh bien? No one has ever died of a little drumming."
"If that were all—" he said, and finished with a Créole sentence that I missed.
We had seen something of Fort-de-France; besides, that city, lying in a bowl of surrounding hills, gets uncomfortably hot in summer. So next day we drove in the other direction, to St. Pierre and Mt. Pelée. You cannot appreciate what a huge thing this mile-high "Bald Mountain" is until you have seen it looming, its summit hidden in condensation clouds.
We stopped at St. Pierre, a narrow, crescent-shaped town built on a slope arising from the shore. Clumps of pale-green banana trees grew on the adjacent slopes. Once the island's main city, St. Pierre is now hardly more than a village. There are still Pompeii-like ruins left over from the great eruption of 1902. We poked around these and went through the museum, viewing the samples of glassware and metallic objects fused into lumps by the heat of the death cloud.
"But," said daughter Héloise, "if the volcano was erupting for a week before the disaster, why didn't the people get away?"
"It was the governor, Louis Mouttet," I said. "Although he was appointed by Paris, they had a local legislature, and an election was coming up. The Liberals represented the white planter class, who had all the money; the Radicals were mostly Negroes, who had the numbers. The governor, who backed the Liberals, feared that any public disturbance might lose the election for them."
"You sound like a Communist," said little Priscille. "Bankers aren't supposed to talk that way."
"Never mind how bankers are supposed to talk. That's what happened. Anyway, those caste distinctions have pretty well broken down by now."
"So Mouttet opposed any plan for evacuation. He even posted soldiers on the road to Fort-de-France to turn back fugitives. Then, at eight o'clock on the morning of May eighth, 1902, off she went. Wiped out thirty-odd thousand people in a few minutes. The only survivor in the main part of town was a condemned murderer in an underground cell. Men didn't beat that record until they got the atomic bomb."
"What happened to the governor?" asked Stephen.
"Nobody knows. He was in St. Pierre at the time, but they never found his body."
We returned in the late afternoon. The roads were fairly good as to surface, having little heavy truck traffic and no freezing winters to tear them up. They are, however, the most hair-raising roads I have ever driven.
On the way back from St. Pierre, the road goes down a slope that calls for low gear to avoid burning your brakes. Then it turns sharply to the left. If you miss the turn, you go right on down into the blue Caribbean, hundreds of feet below. A heavy steel guard rail at the turn had been pushed over and squashed flat; somebody had not made it. I see why they have no roller coasters in Fort-de-France. With the local roads, who needs them?
At cocktail time, the drumming began again. Jacques came out in even greater agitation.
"Monsieur Newbury!" he said. "Look what I have found under the house!"
He held out the separated parts of a little bird: the head, the wings, and the legs.
"That's a lugubrious thing to show at meal time," I said. "What in the name of God is it?"
"It is a wanga, Monsieur."
"You mean some sort of bad-luck charm? What about it?"
"It appeared under the house. I do not know how it arrived there; I have been working around the place all day. But there it was."
"Eh bien, put it in the garbage can."
Jacques sighted. "I wish you well, Monsieur, but I do not know if—" The rest was Créole.
That night, I dreamed I was walking a street in St. Pierre as it was before the eruption. The sun had risen some time before, but the town was so blanketed with black smoke that it was almost as dark as night.
A few others were up and about. Their footsteps made no sound, because of a layer of dark-gray, powdery volcanic ash, several centimeters deep, which covered the streets. I doubt if I could have heard them anyway, over the roar of the volcano. It was eight kilometers away but loomed huge—such of it as could be seen through the murk—even at that distance. The roaring was punctuated by explosions; boulder-sized lava bombs crashed down on the houses.
Then the people in the street were crying out and pointing towards Pelee. An enormous cloud, distinct from the general pall of smoke, had appeared on the side of the mountain. It was a bright, incandescent red, and black around the edges. That is, the interior was red-hot and the surface black. One could see the redness, mottled and shifting, through this black integument.
This ameboid, fiery blob moved swiftly down the mountainside towards the city, flowing over intervening ridges and growing ever larger. I knew what it was: a mixture of incandescent gas and volcanic dust. The high temperature kept it churning, so that the dust could not settle out. At the same time, the dust gave the mass a specific gravity higher than that of air, so the cloud slid down the slope at turnpike speed.
In a few minutes, the red cloud reached the upper parts of the city. The heat became blistering. Buildings in the path of the cloud burst into flame, as if they were paper houses doused with gasoline and ignited.
The cloud slowed up as it reached the lower town, where the slope was less steep. All of a sudden, the streets were full of people running and screaming with their clothes afire. Some fell and lay writhing. Some, left naked by the burning of their garments, burst open. Can you imagine the sight of hundreds running and being burned alive at the same time? Their shrieks merged into a continuous ululation, audible even over the roar from the mountain. My own clothes smoldered and started to burn ...
"Wake up, Willy!" cried Denise, shaking me, "What is it?"
I groggily rubbed the sleep from my eyes and told her.
"No wonder you screamed!" she said. "Now go back to sleep, darling. You are safe here."
The appalling sight I had seen, however, kept me awake for an hour. When I did get to sleep, there I was, back in St. Pierre a few minutes before the eruption. Again the great red cloud of death oozed out of the mountain. While one part of me realized that this was a dream, the rest of me went through all the emotions of a victim, until my shrieks again led Denise to awaken me. I got no more sleep that night.
We spent the next day on Argenton's private little stretch of beach of black volcanic sand. I brought along a pocket timer to make sure that nobody stayed too long in one position in the bright Caribbean sun. But I got drowsy myself, went to sleep on my belly without setting the timer, and woke an hour later with a burned back.
That evening, the drums were at it again. I asked Jacques: "Any more wangas today?"
"No, Monsieur. But do you do well? I heard you call out in the night."
"Just a bad dream, from reading too much about Mt. Pelée."