Last Friday morning, an uncanny silence fell over the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat. Birds stopped singing, dogs ceased barking, and the incessant chirping of insects died away. The silence on this British Dependent Territory was filled by a deep and ominous rumble.
Within seconds the rumble became a thunderous roar - something akin to a jumbo jet hauling itself into the air - and the Soufriere Hills volcano belched a plume of smoke and ash tens of thousands of feet into the azure sky. As the cloud dispersed the sun was blotted out for 15 minutes, and ash and pumice pebbles up to an inch in diameter rained down on two-thirds of the island.
Locals watched the destructive beauty of the eruption with cardboard boxes over their heads to protect themselves from the deluge. "It is a privilege to witness this," said Alfonsus "Arrow" Cassell, Montserrat's leading calypso musician. "A vicious and deadly privilege."
The volcano awoke for the first time in four centuries back in July 1995. It has been erupting sporadically ever since, forcing thousands to abandon their homes. The island's population has dropped from 12,000 to 5,000, with many of those remaining encamped in dire and cramped emergency shelters in the safe zone in the north.
This summer the mountain claimed its first lives. On June 25th, Soufriere sent rivers of superheated gas, rock and ash - pyroclastic flows - tearing down its slopes at more than 100 m.p.h. Material, heated to 900 Fahrenheit, filled farming valleys, leaving 10 people dead and another nine missing, believed buried under volcanic debris.
Since the beginning of August, the volcano has erupted every 12 hours or so. It has laid waste to the capital Plymouth - a once bustling town of 5,000 people where reconstruction had only recently been completed after Hurricane Hugo destroyed or damaged 95 per cent of the island's infrastructure in 1989.
Pyroclastic flows deposited rocks the size of small vans on the outskirts of the town and buried the centre under metres of ash. Many buildings burned out of control, including the government HQ, customs office and a new hospital which had never treated a patient. "I doubt Plymouth will be inhabitable for generations," says police commissioner Francis Hooper.
"The luck of the Irish," quips Montserratian Evette Bramble, referring to Montserrat's original colonists. Following tension between Protestants and Catholics on the neighbouring island of St Kitts in the early 17th century, its governor, Sir Frank Warren, sent the Irish population to colonise Montserrat for the British. They were joined by others exiled by Cromwell's Catholic purges, and soon after the first African slaves arrived in 1650 to work on the island's cotton, tobacco and sugarcane plantations.
A curious mix of Afro-Irish culture resulted. St Patrick's Day was chosen by slaves as the date for their rebellion in 1768, and March 17th is still a public holiday on the island. The shamrock features on Montserrat's immigration stamp, and the phone book is full of Galloways, Cadogans and O'Briens. The heel 'n' toe - an Irish jig - is still danced incongruously to calypso and soca rhythms.
Music has played a prominent role in Montserrat's late 20th-century history, too. The previously undeveloped island loosened up its property laws during the 1960s, selling off land and property to wealthy outsiders. Exclusive retirement homes, winter escapes and guest houses sprang up. When George Martin, who recorded the Beatles, opened his Air Studios in 1979 he cemented Montserrat's image as a playground for the rich and famous. Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, The Police, Dire Straits and Simply Red all recorded there and holidayed at his hideaway.
Danny Sweeney, who used to run a surf shack on the island, recalls teaching Sting to windsurf. "Him a likkle chicken when him start, but I learn him good an' him come back fi more nex year." Danny has lost his home and business to Soufriere and now sells a few beers on Carr's Beach in the north of the island to keep himself and his family. He is one of the luckier ones.
Martin is promoting a benefit concert for the volcano victims at the Royal Albert Hall on September 15th. Many of the artists who have recorded on Montserrat will take part and tickets, priced between £40-160, sold out in 90 minutes. "I hope the aid from this concert will be more efficiently channelled than any government help so far," says Donald Romeo, who has been cataloguing conditions in the emergency shelters.
The Romans believed that volcanoes were gateways to hell, and for many of the island's evacuees this credo holds some figurative truth. In August 1995, several hundred people were moved from the slopes around the volcano and housed in the Gerald's Park emergency shelter. It was intended for short-term use - a week at the most - but two years on they are still there, living in conditions which clearly ignore guidelines laid down by the United Nations. They live (in a tropical climate) in plastic, windowless hangar tents in which families of four or more, including the elderly and mentally disturbed, are allocated an area eight feet square with no storage space.
Reports of sexual molestation are rife and there has been a rise in teenage pregnancy. Toilet facilities are appalling. In some shelters there is only one toilet for every 50 people.
The Montserrat government's answer has been a truck which collects raw sewage and pumps it into shallow, open, and non-porous pits behind Little Bay, which since the destruction of Plymouth has served as the island's port. These pits overflow, polluting Little Bay where fishermen pull in their nets. Bulldozers have pushed earth up around the pits to prevent overflow, the result being that fluid levels have been able to rise above the surrounding ground level. Swarms of flies and mosquitoes are blown upwind towards Gerald's Park and other shelters.
Eleanor Riley, like all other shelter inhabitants, receives a monthly voucher allowance of £30, and £7.50 for each of her four children. "Pampers for my baby cost £10 a month," she shrugs. To make up the shortfall, Clifford, the father of her children, returned regularly to tend his crops in the evacuated zone at the foot of the volcano before leaving the island in search of work. Last year the British government allowed in Montserratians who could pay their passage to Britain. Previously they had no automatic right of entry.
Other islanders simply never left the danger area for fear of conditions awaiting them, and in response to inconsistent advice from the government and volcanologists. The residents of Cork Hill were still there on June 25th when the lava flow passed within yards of a school full of children in their village. Even after the event, the government took two days to move residents. Willy Aspinall, then chief scientist, had hinted at a public meeting nine months earlier that the authorities had no place to house evacuees from the village, and some suggest that school exams on June 26th prevented the government from acting more promptly. Aspinall was reduced to tears when recounting these events.
There has been little or no direct liaison with local communities, and when meetings have taken place they have consisted of villagers being baffled by science. There has been no use of maps, diagrams or the hours of videotape of the volcano's eruptions shot by the Montserrat Volcano Observatory. But authorities are prepared to sell the same footage to the foreign press at £500 a minute.
With the evacuations that have taken place since the original eruption, it has become increasingly necessary to house people in hurricane shelters such as churches and schools. Conditions are no better than at Gerald's Park - some centres have been without bottled gas for more than six weeks.
At the Davy Hill Pilgrims' Church, 42 people crammed into a space 30 feet by 18 cook on open fires right next to their leaking latrine. "We have had no fridge for six months, and the filth has attracted rats and swarms of insects," says Christina Weekes. "Officials drive around in new Jeeps while we live in sub-human conditions." The residents have no insecticide sprays and no netting on their windows - their choice is to be plagued by flies and mosquitoes, or live in sweltering, airless heat inside the church. Many living in churches have to leave on Sundays so that services can be conducted. And with the hurricane season just starting, the island's hurricane shelters are full.
Britain has pledged £37 million in aid so far this year, but the evacuees have yet to see improvements while the temporary hospital continues to operate in dire circumstances. Following meetings in London last week, the chief minister Bertrand Osbourne called a press conference to announce that changes were just around the corner. But locals were unimpressed by his promises.
"I have been to the same press conference five times in the last 18 months," says Donald Romeo. "Seeing, not hearing, is believing." There are attempts to shift the blame for Montserrat's sorry state on to London and its time-consuming bureaucratic processes, but with the information available it is unclear where responsibility lies. The one man central to relations between Britain and Montserrat - governor Frank Savage - was off the island and unavailable for comment. Foreign Office minister George Foulkes is due to visit on August 31st.
Others meanwhile point to a long record of bungling government and wasted funds. In 1988 US scientists left the island in disgust when their report on Soufriere's potential for devastation was mostly ignored by authorities here. Their predictions - including the destruction of Plymouth - proved to be largely accurate. But this did not stop Britain and Montserrat spending huge sums rebuilding the capital after Hurricane Hugo, only to see their efforts destroyed eight years later.
So what next for Montserrat? While locals wait to feel the effect of Britain's aid donations, volcanologists suggest that Soufriere is likely to continue erupting for some time to come. "The mountain has disgorged some 130 million cubic metres of material so far, about a third of its potential, and similar volcanoes have shown continued activity for up to five years," explains Jill Norton of the Volcano Observatory. The magma dome inside the crater continues to grow, and all indicators suggest that the pressure will have to be released before Soufriere returns to dormancy. Experts are reluctant to predict how and when this may happen, but they are not prepared to rule out the small possibility of one huge eruption.
Chief Minister Osbourne equally reluctantly admits that there are contingency plans to evacuate the island, but the logistics of Operation Exodus seem nebulous. Meanwhile locals worry that government complacency may lead to a repeat of Cork Hill, involving the much larger town of Salem, on the edge of the buffer zone (where only restricted movement is allowed) and the safe zone. The town has already been pelted by ash and pebbles on several occasions, and there are fears that a large eruption could devastate it.
No one is prepared to discuss plans for Salem's evacuation, but on Tuesday the Emergency Operations Centre did acknowledge a new and increased risk to the townspeople. They issued them with hard hats.