Flames Coming out of the Top (17 page)

“In a very great hurry,” the man answered. “El Señor returned here at three o'clock this morning and at six o'clock they had gone.”

“And he didn't say where?”

“He said nothing,” the man answered. “He just entered the car and left. Perhaps the Señora might know.”

“Señora Muras is still here then?”

“Señora Muras is resting.” “Tell her I wish to see her.”

“Will you please wait inside?” the man asked politely; evidently Señor Muras's ban had not been extended to the
hacienda
. Perhaps he had not expected Dunnett to come so far.

The manservant was some time in returning. By the time he had got back, Dunnett had reconciled himself to the fact that Señora Muras had probably declined to see him. But the manservant was smiling and encouraging. “Kindly to step this way,” he said. “The Señora is in her bedroom.” He dropped his voice confidentially. “The shock, you will understand, has upset her. It was the
suddenness
of the departure.”

The Señora's bedroom was a room that expressed the dual nature of its inmate; it was at once sombre and hysterical. Heavy black velvet curtains hung at the long windows and little flounces and festoons of lace had been decked about on them to relieve the oppressiveness. There was a
prie-Dieu
facing a polished wooden crucifix the size of a large, skinny baby, and a portable gramophone with a pile of records was beside it. The Señora herself, in a fur-trimmed dressing gown, was sitting up in the tall four-poster bed against a mass of piled-up bolsters. Against the white bedclothes she showed up like a seal. She wore a bright gold turban round her head and was sniffing at some salts in a bottle. Altogether in that moving, pillowy mass it was hard to determine where the Señora ended and where the mere upholstery of the bed began. Dunnett's first impression on entering the room was of a vast trembling mass of something dusky. A lady's maid was standing by as interpreter.

As soon as he entered, the Señora became excited. She turned to her maid and began talking in agitated whispers. The maid turned serenely to Dunnett. “The Señora wishes to know what you have done with her husband,” he said.

“I haven't done anything,” Dunnett assured her. “I came out here to find out where he is.”

There were more whispers. Then the maid resumed. “The Señora says that you sent him away,” she replied. “Until you came everything was all right. But now he has gone away and taken his daughter with him.”

“Do you know where they have gone?” Dunnett enquired.

“The Señora says that he must have gone to the front.”

“You mean the Chaco?”

The Señora's replies were stifled by sobs which began to run through her. They were sobs on the Señora's scale of things. Soon the whole bed was shaking. “She says he will get killed,” the maid remarked. “She knows he will. Those devils from Paraguay will find him and the Señora will be left a widow: a fortune teller predicted it.”

“Will you ask what makes the Señora think that he has gone to the Chaco?”

There was a conference as soon as the Señora was quieter, and the maid turned to Dunnett. “It is the business,” she said.

“What business?”

There was no answer. Señora Muras appeared to have forgotten about Dunnett's presence by now. She was lying on her back grasping the lady's maid by the hand and asking to be comforted. When there came a pause the maid obligingly translated the whole outburst.

“She says that it is rifles that he is selling,” she explained. “El Señor saw the trouble coming and has been preparing for it. And now that it has come he will give his life for it.” She caught a little of Señora Muras's infectious misery and began weeping too.

“Do you know the name of the place he has gone to?”

“The Señora says,” the maid resumed after a pause, “that if she knew she would be there too. She is not a woman to stay at home when her husband is in danger.”

“Then the Señora cannot help me?”

The question, when put to her, seemed to upset Señora

Muras. She rose up until she was almost standing on the bed, and began to shout things at Dunnett.

“She says that at a moment like this she cannot help anyone but herself,” the maid interpreted. “She believes that you are a Paraguayan agent and she wishes you to go. If el Señor dies, she will kill you.”

Dunnett left the
hacienda
without further ceremony. The driver of the green and orange taxi brightened at the sight of him.

“Get back to Amricante as soon as you can,” Dunnett directed.

“Ten bolivianos,” the driver replied without moving. “What do you mean?”

“Ten bolivianos from Amricante to the
hacienda
—ten bolivianos from the
hacienda
to Amricante,” the driver explained with the air of a teacher communicating one of the simpler kind of truths.

“I gave you three, didn't I?”

“I shall need three more.”

“What for?”

“Gasolene.”

“But there's nowhere on the way to get any,” Dunnett pointed out.

“I have two spare cans with me,” the driver answered. “Then what do you want the money for?”

“For the gasolene.”

Dunnett took out his notecase and paid the driver another three bolivianos; it seemed simpler than arguing.

Dunnett did not notice the ride home. He was thinking too busily to notice anything. Even when the car stopped for half-an-hour while the driver tinkered cautiously with the engine, approaching it in that mood of respectful incredulity characteristic of men who have been brought up to the horse, he did not worry; moving or stationary it did not affect the salient fact of Señor Muras's disappearance. Sitting there in the sweltering heat while the driver tapped at things with
a pair of insulated pliers, he suffered that clammy panic of a man who knows that something urgent has got to be done but does not know what. The only thing that was obvious was to send a cable.

The cable clerk greeted Dunnett almost as an old friend. He regarded Dunnett as easily the most promising of his patrons. Confidential cables he got in plenty: they provided him with his choicest bits of conversation. But it was only very rarely that he was able to study the full saga of a quarrel as in the case of
l' affaire
Muras; if he missed any relevant details he had only to go to the bunch of filed carbons and consult the duplicate. He was so excited he even pressed his forehead up against the bars in an endeavour to see what Dunnett was writing. And he was not disappointed with what he read. “AGENT MISSING,” the message ran, “NEW ADDRESS NOT KNOWN EITHER AT OFFICE OR HOME STOP REPORTED DESTINATION CHACO STOP APPARENTLY ENGAGED IN ARMAMENTS BUSINESS STOP NOTHING LEFT IN AMRICANTE ON WHICH TO DISTRAIN STOP WILL FOLLOW INTO CHACO IF YOU AUTHORISE DUNNETT.”

“So,” he muttered as he read, “it has all come out at last. He has been exposed.”

“You said something?” Dunnett asked.

The clerk recovered himself. “I was only calculating the cost,” he said. “Your address at the top is free if not for sending.”

Dunnett turned and left the Post Office. He was conscious only of the fact that he had failed.

The Morning of the eruption dawned torrid and sultry. There seemed to be a solid, malevolent wall of heat built round the city. It pressed in from all sides, stifling everything. The thermos jug beside Dunnett's bed was tepid within, but when he poured himself a little water the glass misted over in an instant. Outside, in the street, the paving stones were unbearably hot through thin soles, and people did not touch the brass rail in the tramcar if they could help it. For the most part the town protected itself with sun blinds. There were acres of them. These broke up the glare so that the rays that fell onto their upper surface were transformed into a diffuse, burning glow beneath. But even so the air was uncomfortably bright below: it was as though one were steadily breathing an atmosphere that was only a point away from incandescence.

Not that there was anything strange in that; no one who lived in Amricante was unused to high temperatures. It was merely, as the local expression went, that the heat had come in a little
closer
this time. And with every hour of the day it drew in closer and closer still. By ten o'clock it registered a full noon temperature; and the barometer began to fall. It went down steadily, dropping with a sort of stupid rapidity. People in the know said that there was going to be a storm; but no one took very much notice. Storms, even bad ones, were not uncommon along that Coast, and they did not alarm anyone. When some local prophet said “hurricane,” the rest laughed at him. By midday, however, signs and wonders had begun to appear. The sparrows were the first indication of something unusual. They stopped following the horses, and congregated in great flocks, twittering distractedly, as though contemplating some unthinkable migration. And the
horses themselves began acting queerly. So far from being drugged by the heat, they began whinnying and stamping their feet as though no longer certain of the earth they stood on. One or two dogs barked aimlessly at nothing. And the pigeons kept wheeling round in hysterical circles as though they had just heard a gun go off. On the horizon clouds could be seen massing and a great black dome appeared over the top of the Fiery Mountain and continued to sit there.

The thermometer meanwhile went grimly upwards and the barometer continued helplessly to fall. By two o'clock people who talked about hurricanes were no longer laughed at. The men down by the harbour discussed the possibility of a tidal wave and began hauling in their boats, and the shopkeepers started nailing up shutters against the eventual wind. But nothing happened. A thin plume of smoke waved above Fiery Mountain unable to rise; and the mountain itself, majestic and overpowering, seemed to be presiding over the town and protecting it. By four o'clock, however, a curious uneasiness came over everyone. Like the sparrows, they too started to assemble as though seeking safety in numbers. Gradually the whole town capitulated before the heat. The cafes presented a curiously broken-up appearance with the front rows, where the sun had grilled the iron chairs, utterly empty and the back rows solid with sleepy customers too inert to move. Even the buses, never frequent, became still fewer. Either the driver drew up at the side of the road and waited for his engine to cool, or returned to the depot and did not come out again. The heat was by now the only topic of conversation. People began predicting disasters—earth tremors and submarine disturbances. Significantly enough no one at all referred to the Fiery Mountain; that would have been too much like asking for something to happen. And in a curious, intangible way the general apprehension of peril increased. It was one fear being shared by thirty thousand people. Those who were indoors came out, and the groups in the square kept shifting and dividing and going back into their houses to inspect their belongings. To keep
still was impossible; it was too much like waiting for
it—
whatever
it
was—to happen. When a negro porter suddenly collapsed and died on one of the Botanic Society's flowerbeds the crowd really felt that things were about to begin, and the news spread through the whole town. The body remained where it was for upwards of half-an-hour before anyone thought of removing it.

The timbre of the place, moreover, became strangely changed. A close, intense hush fell over everything so that voices sounded unnatural and muffled, and talking across the street became simply a matter of moving lips, like conversation in a dream. It was in that sombre and loaded silence that the first murmurs of the outbreak were heard. They began as a low rumbling, like Summer thunder, from nowhere in particular. The noise, a sort of drumming in the air, came from all quarters at once. It was as though the very framework of things were throbbing. Children looked up doubtingly into their parents' faces and some of them began to cry. Women felt it, too, and complained of headaches as the noise grew louder; and then the sound died away again until the noise could be heard only by listening for it; it was as though the unseen orchestra had drifted out to the sea. This happened three times in all. Only the last time the beating, roaring noise was very much louder, as though it were right overhead; it was like the noise of endless processions of trains passing over iron bridges. It set up a kind of pulsing in the ears, and on all sides hands were being pressed to the sides of heads. It seemed at that moment as though any more would be unendurable.

And that was still half-an-hour before the explosion.

When it came, it came quite suddenly; there were no preliminary shocks or rumblings. At one moment the Fiery Mountain was merely a large smoky crag against a dense black cloud; and, at the next, it had blown itself up. With a rush, the top went sailing away into the sky, dissolving into fragments as it went; some of these, of boulder size, drifted for miles before they fell. Fortunately for Amricante, however,
the direction of the discharge was away from it: it was as though the Fiery Mountain were bombarding something on the other side of the Cordilleras. What Amricante came in for was the recoil. This was approximately simultaneous with the vision of the ascending summit, and several seconds before—a quarter of a minute perhaps—the actual sound of the detonation. The whole town lurched and seemed to jump back a few inches. The total movement could not have been very large; a man walking could have taken it in his stride without noticing it. But in the rooted and stationary town the effect was terrific. Windows went right and left, and those that were left were shattered a moment later by the noise of the explosion; walls bulged suddenly, took up a new position strikingly out of the vertical, remained there for a few minutes perfectly firm, and then collapsed. And as soon as one of the walls had gone, the roof of course followed; and usually the other three walls as well. It was a matter only of seconds—or at the most a minute—to convert a perfectly good house into an inelegant heap of ruins.