Mount Pelée

“ In 1902, after the first explosion, Mount Pelée continued its eruptions for several months, and in the late stages there slowly rose, through the crater, this strange shaft of red-hot lava, like a great iron beam forged by giant hammers in Vulcan's famous blacksmith-shop. As it rose it crumbled and finally fell to pieces. It was forced up by the gases beneath and shaped by the crater through which it came; but can you conceive of anything more weird and awesome?
3. This middle zone is made up of different kinds of rock that require different degrees of heat to melt them. ”

“ Perhaps some of our readers may remember the great eruption of Mount Pelée, which took place in Martinique some years ago. At one stage of the eruption a great obelisk of rock a thousand feet high was pushed upwards out of the crater, and eventually sank back again. It came out of the depths of the earth. It was like a vent-peg plugging some boiling mass below. Similarly we might suppose that all volcanoes were vent-holes for the tremendous commotion of boiling fiery rocks below the -87- earth's surface. ”

“ The air is oppressing; your nose burns. Are we going to die asphyxiated? What has to-morrow in store for us? A flow of lava, rain or stones or a cataclysm from the sea? Who can tell? Will give you my last thought if I must die.”
A St. Pierre paper of May 3 announces that an excursion arranged for the next day to Mount Pelee had been postponed, as the crater was inaccessible, adding that notice would be issued when the excursion would take place.
An inhabitant of Morne Rouge, a town of 600 inhabitants, seven kilometers from St. ”

“ The internal mechanism of Mont Pelee and La Souffriere is fairly clear in the light of what may be called the natural history of vulcanisni; for, just as the life history of organic orders and genera is traced only by aid of fossils, so the ontogeny of the volcano may be viewed in the light of the phylogeny traced through its fossil remains—lava sheets, tuff beds, laccolites, volcanic necks like those of the Mount Taylor plateau, and other products of organic action during the ages past. ”

“ Pierre are practically gone. I looked toward the gray old volcano, whose summit was shrouded, but the lower slopes were sunlit and silent and powdery; the whole landscape is powdery, like old statuary with a dust coating that makes stronger the modeling of the city; mountain slope and cliff are bare, the verdure of the Carbet hillside ends abruptly along a sharp line, and there begins the new volcanic landscape, clean chiselled, rocky, weird, gray, uniform, without any color, without any motion except steam-jets on Pelée's slopes. ”

“ Mont Pelée, the most awful evidence of natural force to be seen in the world to-day—La Pelée, majestic, terrible, overpowering, has been in evidence from starlight to starlight, but it is the ashen blank that was once the city of the Saint of the Rock that stands out most clearly in the kaleidoscopic maze slipping backward and forward before our eyes. ”

“ Daily the little steamer takes a cargo from St. Pierre, for the ash from the volcano has enriched the soil, and the planters are growing wealthy. There are many more little houses and thatched huts tucked into corners of the ruins than appear at first sight, and a hotel has been built for the tourists who visit the strange spot.
The crater in Mont Pelée is silent now; the great vent which hurled white-hot rocks, incandescent dust and mephitic gases, is now covered with a thick green shrubbery, only here and there do small smoke-holes emit a light sulphurous vapor ”

“ But all this is now repeated for us more imposingly, more grandiosely;—it is wrought upon a larger scale than anything we have yet seen. The semicircular sweep of the harbor, dominated by the eternally veiled summit of the Montagne Pelee (misnamed, since it is green to the very clouds) , from which the land slopes down on either hand to the sea by gigantic undulations, is one of the fairest sights that human eye can gaze upon. Thus viewed, the whole island shape is a mass of green, with purplish streaks and shadowings here and there: glooms of forest-hollows, or moving umbrages of cloud. ”

“ Nearer the crater of Mont Pelee, the dust—'ashes' of the press reports, 'lapilli' of the books—lies like snow in drifts and sheets sometimes several feet in depth, and is mingled with fragments of pumice or bombs of denser rock, perhaps torn from the throat of the crater. Naturally the rock-rain was cool at Barbados and other remote stations; on St. Vincent, after the outbreak of La Souffriere, and on Martinique under each eruption of Mont Pelee, the falling rock was warm, even hot ”

“ One must be very sure of the weather before undertaking the ascent of Pelée; for if one merely selects some particular leisure day in advance, one's chances of seeing anything from the summit are considerably less than an astronomer's chances of being able to make a satisfactory observation of the next transit of Venus. Moreover, if the heights remain even partly clouded, it may not be safe to ascend the Morne de la Croix,—a cone-point above the crater itself, and ordinarily invisible below. ”

“ Mountains springing to life against a sky still showing a trace of stars, the cloud turban of Pelée, first a luminous haze like some vast nebula just born, then a burning fleece of gold. Then, just as though the shadows of night were a garment unloosed and let slip, the great mountain undrapes itself and stands a cone of emerald green, a pyramid of colour in the blue and voiceless sky.
St. Pierre is still in shadow, but the whole eastward side of the island is burning in the sun. St. Pierre has its feet in the Caribbean Sea, but Grande Anse is washed by the Atlantic. ”

“ Children played in its bowers and arbors; families picnicked there day after day during the balmy weather; hundreds of tourists ascended to the summit and looked with pleasure at the beautiful crystal lake which sparkled and glinted in the sunshine. Mont Pelee was the place of enjoyment of the people of St. Pierre. I can hear the placid natives say: “Old Father Pelee is our protector—not our destroyer.”
Not until two weeks before the eruption did the slumbering mountain show signs of waking to death and disaster. On the 23d of April it first displayed symptoms of internal disquiet. ”

“ And a cloudless afternoon can never be predicted from the aspect of deceitful Pelée: when the crater edges are quite clearly cut against the sky at dawn, you may be tolerably certain there will be bad weather during the day; and when they are all bare at sundown, you have no good reason to believe they will not be hidden next morning. Hundreds of tourists, deluded by such appearances, have made the weary trip in vain,—found themselves obliged to return without having seen anything but a thick white cold fog. ”

“ Pierre in a carriage with several friends, to make the ascent by the shortest route of all,—that of the Morne St. Martin, one of Pelée's western counterforts. We drive north along the shore for about half an hour; then, leaving the coast behind, pursue a winding mountain road, leading to the upper plantations, between leagues of cane. The sky begins to brighten as we ascend, and a steely glow announces that day has begun on the other side of the island. Miles up, the crest of the volcano cuts sharp as a saw-edge against the growing light: there is not a cloud visible. ”

“ Sometimes, while looking at La Pelée, I have wondered if the enterprise of the great Japanese painter who made the Hundred Views of Fusiyama could not be imitated by some creole artist equally proud of his native hills, and fearless of the heat of the plains or the snakes of the slopes. A hundred views of Pelée might certainly be made: for the enormous mass is omnipresent to dwellers in the northern part of the island, and can be seen from the heights of the most southern mornes. ”

“ Measured merely by mortality, Mont Pelee marks one of the darkest chapters in human history; measured by the upwelling of human sympathy, it stands for one of the brightest chapters; and measured by the prompt and effective inauguration of research, it must be said to open a new chapter in vulcanology.
The destruction of St. Pierre on the morning of May 18 was one of a series of episodes closely connected in time if not in cause. The chain began with eruptions from the long quiescent crater of Colima (western Mexico) late last year ”

“ These are La Montagne Pelée, in the north, and La Montagne du Vauclin, in the south. The term morne, used throughout the French West Indian colonies to designate certain altitudes of volcanic origin, a term rather unsatisfactorily translated in certain dictionaries as "a small mountain," is justly applied to the majority of Martinique hills, and unjustly sometimes even to its mightiest elevation,—called Morne Pelé, or Montagne Pelée, or simply "La Montagne," according, perhaps, to the varying degree of respect it inspires in different minds. ”

“ Mont Pelée has now been in a condition of forceful activity for upwards of two hundred days; can we assume that during this time it may have thrown out a mass of material whose cubical contents are hardly less than a quarter of the area of Martinique as it now appears above the waters? One is, indeed, almost appalled by the magnitude of this work, and yet the work may even be very much greater than is here stated. We ask ourselves the questions, what becomes of the void that is being formed in the interior? What form of new catastrophe does it invite? ”

“ Pierre, the eye under-estimates its bulk; and when you climb the mornes about the town, Labelle, d'Orange, or the much grander Parnasse, you are surprised to find how much vaster Pelée appears from these summits. Volcanic hills often seem higher, by reason of their steepness, than they really are ”

“ You drive towards Au Prêcheur, and begin the ascent on foot, through cane-plantations.... The road by which you follow the north-west coast round the skirts of Pelée is very picturesque:—you cross the Roxelane, the Rivière des Pères, the Rivière Sèche (whose bed is now occupied only by a motionless torrent of rocks) ;—passing first by the suburb of Fond-Corré, with its cocoa groves, and broad beach of iron-gray sand,—a bathing resort;—then Pointe Prince, and the Fond de Canonville, somnolent villages that occupy wrinkles in the hem of Pelée's lava robe. ”

“ Thousands of dead were buried underfoot amid the rubble, for the day before our visit, there had been a second blast from Pelée, the 4,000 foot volcano smoking four miles away. This had thrown down what roofs remained after the first explosion.
We arrived opposite St. Pierre May 21, 1902, and saw a smoking, dusty line of ruins along the shore. Before we landed we were warned that if the tug’s whistle should blow we were to make for the boats. The dusty hill lay on our left like a gray snow landscape, not at all like a cone. The crater was a gorge in an ordinary mountain under clouds. ”

“ The hills around were [Pg 213] green, and verdure spread over the country once deep in volcanic ash. But Mont Pelée was brown and bald still.
Nineteen years had passed since the eruption, but St. Pierre had not recovered. At first sight, from the sea, the town gave a slight impression of being rebuilt. But this was only the strange combination of old ruins and modern fishing huts. The handsome stone wharves still stood, but no vessels lay beside them.
The little steamer slowed and tied up at a tiny wooden pier. A statue, symbolical of St. ”

“ Poliahu in legendary battles has met Pele many times. She has kept the upper part of the mountain desolate under her mantle of snow and ice, but down toward the sea most fertile and luxuriant valleys and hillside slopes attest the gifts of the goddess to the beauty of the island and the welfare of men.
Out of Mauna Loa, Pele has stepped forth again and again, and has hurled eruptions of mighty force and great extent against the maiden of the snow-mantle, but the natives say that in this battle Pele has been and always will be defeated. ”

“ Nobody can complain to Saint Peter that Pelée hasn't warned."
"There's another way to look at it," Charter said. "The volcano's overflow into the River Blanche might have eased the pressure upon the craters. I wonder if there is any authority or precedent for such a hope?"
"If Pelée's fuse is burning shorter and shorter toward a Krakatoan cataclysm," Peter Stock declared moodily, "it's not for man to say what spark will shake the world.... I tried to see Mondet this morning—but couldn't get in. You wouldn't think one white, small person could contain so much poison. ”

“ Evil as it was, the taint brought a sense of proximity to the Morne and the Palms. Saint Pierre was dark and harrowingly still under the throbbing volcano. The hoof-beats of the mule were muffled in ash, as if he pounded along a sandy beach. Often a rousing fetor reached the nostrils of the rider, above the drying, cutting vapor from Pelée, and the little beast shied and snorted at untoward humps on the highway. ”

“ More commonly it appears as the material filling fissures and pipes, traversing the ashes irregularly or rising as a central plug in the interior of the neck, and sending out branching veins. Occasionally a whole neck is composed of solid crystalline rock representing the last part of the magma which ascended from the underground focus and congealed within the crater. In Mont Pelée, for instance, the last stage of the eruptions of 1902 to 1905 was the protrusion of a great column of solidified lava which rose at one time to a height of 900 ft. ”