Aa to Tuff
Volcanoes. By Fred M. Bullard. (Nelson, 45s.)
Usrru. the mushrooms actually sprang up over the first atomic explosions, surely nothing could compete, for sheer drama, with a good volcanic eruption? Between the two phenomena there are superficial similarities; and the Japanese, part of whose national role has been to 'sit on a volcano,' were evidently fated to be the first victims of the man-made thing. How we night- editors lapped up the details of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki raids, when they came over the tapes! For me it recalled nights in the school cellars in 1914, where the Prep Dorm gathered to jeer as the zeppelins purred overhead, making small pops in the distance. That autumn the Austrian waiters vanished from the dining-hall into internment; and our masters in art, English
and French, posted out to 'the Front' never to return, were replaced by a versatile mademoiselle from the French West Indies. Her ineffably thrilling eye-witness account of the eruption of Mont Pelee was embellished with blackboard
esquisses. We learned a great deal and writhed with delicious terror of a possible volcano blow- ing its top in the Midlands.
No such luck; for the nearest tremble belt i5 way north in Iceland. Later we recaptured some of the old thrill in The Last Days of Pompeii, and in that blasé letter from Pliny junior, aged eighteen, to Tacitus, describing the death of his naval uncle in the fall-out from Vesuvius. The scale of the thing must account for most of. the drama: the noise, the colours, the sense of Ore' sistible force, the florescence of an outsize fire- work. Isn't it this that strikes one with awe, even in a description or a film? Mythology is full of Volcanic material. The two came together a lot in the /Egean basin, promoting both processions and rites of propitiation.
In a splendid comprehensive book on the sub- ject, Dr. Bullard tells practically all we need to know, though not quite all we'd like to learn; the recent Tristan da Cunha eruption is not men- tioned, for example, but there's a fine coloured glimpse on the dust-cover of the 'new' Paracutin cone belching away. It's primarily a scientific book, written in a dry and personal prose quite free from the 'cosy' styling which afflicts so many American imports. The transition from mythology to volcanology is made somewhat abruptly. From then on we are in the physical world, concerned with the classification of types —Pelean, Vulcanian, Strombolian, Hawaiian, Icelandic—and their place in geology. Dr. Bullard endears himself to the reader at once as a true enthusiast. Volcanoes are his pets. As says on the blurb: 'Fred Bullard is personally acquainted with many active volcanoes, having visited them at the very bottom of their calderas, and at the very threshold of their craters . . . camera in hand.'
The first thing which must entrance the geo- logically innocent reader is the poetry of names. Not of volcanoes alone, but of the special jar- gon, too. How delightful to wander about among magmatic toping and lithic tuff! How exciting to come upon Aa, which is jagged lava, or Pahoehoe, which is ropy lava! What we should dub dross is known as tephra. There are two sorts of crust, called Graben and Horst; and a sub-glacial eruption is graced with the name of Jokulhlaup. More terrible and beautiful than its gay French name is the lethal incandescent curtain known as the nuee ardente.
Sometimes the poetry is in the pity of the dead : 'Mount Misery on St. Kitts is plugged by a massive lava dome' (and another caps the Soufriere on Guadeloupe). The side-effects of a dramatic eruption may be odd. In 1835, fifty miles from Coseguina, there was darkness on the third day and 'the terror of the inhabitants • . anticipating the approach of Judgment Day, was so great that 300 of, those living out of wedlock were married at once.' Four hundred Miles off, the fort at Belize was manned, the din of eruption having been mistaken for a naval engagement in the harbour.
It may surprise many to learn that there are still active volcanoes to the weird number of 454, and that some of them mean big business. Dr. Bullard shows how they grow, almost like living organisms; how they flower, flinging up stone-pine clouds or hen's-egg pumice or boulders, their lava encroaching inchmeal across the landscape, their pollen of white or grey ash Powdering distant shipping. He shows how some have been tamed and harnessed to provide heat and power. He tells us much that is incidentally engaging, such as that gravity is measured in gals (after Galileo), but leaves certain aspects of his subject unexplored. It's not only in the Mediterranean that precise dates for volcanic disturbances in ancient times might afford clinching archaeological evidence.
Perhaps Freud might have told us, too, why Volcanoes have offered to myth such powerful symbols (are they bisexual?). According to Freud, anyway, the jealous Old Testament Jahve had a volcanic origin. There is meanwhile some- thing strangely comforting in realising that man- Made bangs have by no means yet outbid the volcanic eruptions we still call 'acts of God.'
HUGH GORDON PORTEUS
Previous page
