04 Volcano Adventure

Volcano Adventure

By Willard Price

Author’s Note

The chief characters in this book are fictional, but the volcanic events described actually happened. A bell containing observers did descend 1,250 feet into the boiling crater of Mihara, the Kaiyo Maru was sunk by a submarine explosion, divers discovered Falcon Island fifty feet below the surface, Tin Can’s thirty craters erupted so savagely that the entire population had to be removed, Mauna Loa has frequently sent rivers of lava to the sea, and Hilo was saved by bombing.

The author has personally visited all the scenes described. In his pursuit of information on the habits of volcanoes, he has climbed Asama, Aso, Mihara, Kilauea, Mauna Loa, Paricutin and Vesuvius, and has flown over Popocatepetl, Pelee,Momotombo, Izalco, Misti, Stromboli, Etna, Uracas, and Apo.

It was very dark. A heavy blanket of fog hid the stars. The fog was so thick that the three mountain climbers could hardly see each other even with the help of their electric torches.

The fog was cold, the wind was cold, every bone in Hal’s body was cold. It was necessary to climb the volcano at night, for it would have been too hot a trip under the broiling sun. But Hal, shivering, thought he would almost rather be too hot than too cold. He had given his sweater to his younger brother, Roger, but he still had his trench coat and this he zipped up to the chin.

Roger puffed and panted along beside him. The boy was usually merry and mischievous, but after three hours of stiff climbing he had very little fun left in him.

‘This old volcano must be as high as the moon,’ he complained. ‘Aren’t we nearly at the top?’

‘Afraid not,’ Hal replied. ‘We may be half way there.’

Roger groaned.

‘Save your breath, boys,’ said the third member of the party, ‘you’ll need it. The hardest part is ahead.’ And Dr Dan Adams, volcanologist, scrambled up the face of a cliff as easily as if it had been a flight of stairs.

Ignoring his own advice to save breath, he burst into song. The song rose over the shriek of the wind and the rumbling of the volcano.

Hal wished he wouldn’t sing. There was something wild about it, something not quite right. Perhaps it was meant to be a cheerful song, but it made a chill run down Hal’s spine. The night suddenly seemed full of strange, terrible faces swimming by in the flying fog.

‘Snap out of it,’ said Hal, but he said it only to himself. He must keep a grip on his nerves. There was nothing the matter with the song. Why shouldn’t the man sing if he wanted to?

It would sound all right in the daytime. Perhaps it was Just weird because of the night, the fog, the screaming wind, the muttering mountain, the quaking of the earth beneath, the fall of ash and cinders upon steel helmets, the occasional flash of light far above when the crater threw up its column of fire … the unreality of the whole tiling.

That must be why the song seemed so strange, more like the cry of a wild loon than the voice of a man.

The doctor was no wild loon. He was a sober scientist.. He was the American Museum’s expert on volcanoes. He had studied volcanoes all over the world. He had gone down into the craters, analysed the gases, measured the lava flow, charted the eruptions, written learned reports.

Volcanoes to him were just figures and facts. He was cool, mathematical, scientific, a brilliant scholar.

Hal thought how lucky he and Roger were to be chosen as his assistants. They knew nothing about volcanoes - but they had powerful young bodies and they had already had a few months’ experience on expeditions in the Amazon valley and among Pacific islands. Now summer vacation was almost over and they would ordinarily have been thinking about getting back to school. But since they were both below the average age of their classes their father, John Hunt, the famous naturalist and animal collector, had allowed them a year off from their studies to get a practical education on expeditions for him and his scientific friends.

So here they were, half way up an exploding Japanese volcano in the dead of night with a man singing like a wild loon.

Whang! A cinder the size of a hen’s egg struck Hal’s helmet and bounced away.

Luckily these cinders, which had been white-hot when thrown up by the volcano, were cold after they had fallen through a mile of chill fog. Hal almost wished they were hot.

The cold wind blew the damp fog straight through his clothes; he could wring the water out of his coat.

Now and then they climbed out of the fog into clear air. But their torches showed another fog bank above them and presently they were in it. So they climbed from cloud to cloud.

And all this time there was a nice warm fire near by. Inside the mountain. Hal put his hand on the ground. He could feel the warmth. A terrific fire with a temperature ten times the boiling point of water was burning under his feet while he shivered and shook with the cold. He couldn’t wait to get to the edge of the crater where he could enjoy the heat from this gigantic furnace.

Suddenly the mountain shook itself like a wet dog and sent up a spout of flame.

Then a new shower of cinders fell. Falling on steel helmets they were harmless enough, but when they struck shoulders or backs they bruised the flesh. And one never knew when something bigger might fall. Mt Asama had been known to throw out rocks as big as motor cars.

That wasn’t likely to happen just now. Asama was not in violent eruption. If she had been, they wouldn’t be climbing her. She was just in one of her muttering moods.

That didn’t mean that she was quite safe. In fact, only a few days earlier two climbers had been killed by a shower of rocks, and a month ago a man was trapped between two streams of lava and burned to death. Ashes and cinders were pouring down upon roofs twenty miles away and earthquakes had tumbled several houses in the near-by town of Karuizawa.

But this was not much compared with what Asama could do when she really got angry. In one eruption she had buried forty-eight villages a hundred feet deep under a river of boiling lava. That is twice as deep as Pompeii was buried. But then, Asama is twice the height of Vesuvius and can be twice as violent.

Now she seemed to be slowly building up in preparation for another terrific eruption. It might come in a year, a month, a day. Who could tell?

If anybody could tell, a trained volcanologist could. Perhaps Dr Dan Adams could solve the mystery of Asama.

Suddenly Roger stopped dead in his tracks.

‘Ghosts!’ he cried.

Hal and the doctor stopped and looked at Roger. Was the kid cracking up? Both of them had some advice ready for him, but before they could speak Roger said:

‘Up there,’ and pointed up the steep slope.

They looked but could see nothing. The fog closed in around them like a gigantic mosquito net. It swept swiftly across the ground, not in a solid mass, but in ripples or shivers before the wind. The doctor’s wild singing had stopped but the wind was singing just as wild a tune and the roar of the volcano, the flashes of fire, the rain of rocks, the atmosphere of suspense and danger, were hard on the nerves. The boy couldn’t be blamed for beginning to imagine things.

‘What’s the matter with you blokes?’ Roger said disrespectfully. ‘Up there!’

They looked again. Now they saw what Roger’s keen eyes had picked out in the fog. Far up the slope, three lights seemed to be doing a ghostly dance.

Were they fireballs from the volcano? Were they the glowing parts of a stream of lava that was sweeping down upon them and would soon bury them in its blazing depths?

‘Evidently we’re not alone on the mountain/ said the doctor. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, ‘Hello-o-o-o!’

The lights above stopped moving. The three climbers listened. But no human voice rose over the scream of the wind and roar of the volcano.

The doctor called again. This time there was an answering cry from above.

‘Come on,’ said the doctor, ‘we’re going to have company.’ And they lost no time climbing up around the lava boulders and over slippery ash until they came to the three lights, which they found were held by three young Japanese climbers.

‘Komban wo,’ said the oldest of the three, and ran on in Japanese. Then, as his torch caught the faces of the newcomers, he said,

‘Ah, I think you speak English. I too speak English. I teacher of English in Nagoya Middle School. These are two of our students, Kobo and Machida. They no speak good like me. My name Toguri.’

The doctor introduced himself and his two companions and everyone shook hands, all equally delighted to have company on the climb to the crater’s mouth. Now the night and the mystery, the fog and the cold, the wailing wind and thundering mountain, did not seem quite so nerve-racking.

And what made Hal and Roger especially happy was that the doctor did not sing any more in that weird, blood-curdling way of his but talked reasonably and cheerfully as the six climbed on up the shaking mountain.

The darkness was turning from black to grey. Day was coming. Presently there was enough light to see by and they could turn off their torches.

And what a dreary waste they saw! Great black blocks of lava, streams of ashes, not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass. The moon itself could not be any more bare and bald. This was a place where nothing dared to grow and it seemed as if man himself had no right to be here.

Only the fog was perfectly at home, rushing and rippling over the wet black rocks. It came in bursts and billows. One moment you could see twenty feet ahead, the next moment you could hardly see your hand before your face.

In the darkness and fog they had lost what little trail there had been. Now they simply blundered upward, slipping in the ashes, scratched by the sharp, glassy ridges of lava, clambering up cliffs like mountain goats, trying to keep their balance when the ground shook. Suddenly a violent quake made the rocks bounce. There was a sliding, ripping sound above them.

‘Look out!’ cried the doctor. ‘Under this ledge -quick!’

The six huddled in the shallow cave under the projecting ledge as tons of rock, ash, and cinder thundered down like a deadly waterfall within a few feet of their faces. While it passed their hiding place it completely blocked out the light. Then it rampaged down the mountainside, its roar becoming fainter and fainter as it was swallowed up in the fog.

‘Stay where you are for a minute.’ A few rocks that had been too slow to keep up with the avalanche now came tumbling down. Some of them were quite big enough to kill a man. When all seemed quiet again, the climb was resumed.

At last the ground began to level out and the six weary volcanologists found themselves upon what appeared to be the top of the mountain. But where was the crater?

This was no simple volcano. It did not rise to a point. The top of the mountain consisted of mile upon mile of hilly country. Somewhere there was a crater. But, without a trail to follow, who could tell where it might be? In clear weather the rising smoke could be seen. In this dense fog, the six explorers could only see each other.

It was bitterly cold, for they were now more than eight thousand feet above sea level. The sweeping fog seemed to go straight through them. They huddled behind a great rock and held a council of war. The great rock split the fog as if it had been a river and it rolled by on either side.

‘We make fire,’ said Toguri, trying to speak cheerfully. He looked about for wood. There was not a twig, not a leaf, to be seen anywhere.

The six ransacked their pockets and brought out various small pieces of paper. When they were all put together they made a pile a few inches high. The doctor set it alight and they all warmed their hands over the tiny blaze. In less than five minutes it was out.

‘I hungry,’ said Toguri. ‘You hungry?’ He produced a small wooden box and opened it to reveal some fish and rice. ‘We call this bento. You like?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ replied Dr Adams. ‘And perhaps you would like some of this.’ And he produced a few chocolate bars. So they shared each other’s small provisions.

Roger, dipping into the bento box, got hold of something that looked like a white worm. He held it up and examined it doubtfully.

‘Octopus tentacle,’ said the cheerful Toguri. ‘Very good. You like?’

‘I like,’ said Roger, and gulped it down.

Only one of the six did not eat. That was Kobo. He sat on a block of lava a little apart from the rest. His face was pale and drawn and he seemed to be sunk in painful thought.

The doctor stood up. ‘Now, Toguri-san, how are we going to find that crater?’

The teacher of English waved his hands and grinned. Nothing seemed to bother him.

‘Perhaps we no find. I think we lost. Perhaps fog go away, then we find. Perhaps fog no go away. Many miles of hills on top of this mountain. Sometimes people wander about in the fog here for days. We just stay here. Nothing we can do.’

Dr Adams did not say what he thought He thought that Toguri must be a pretty poor teacher of English, and a pretty poor teacher of courage.