1

At first you thought it was simply another earthquake. There had been three in the past few days, and you had become used to them by now.

It always went the same way. First, your stomach unexpectedly turned over. For a second or two, you were frozen to the spot, wondering what had happened. Then, if you were unlucky enough to be caught inside your hut, you might have the presence of mind to look upwards. If the oil lamps were swinging, you knew it was an earthquake, and you hurried outside, the ground swelling and bloating underneath you, until you could find somewhere safe to sit that wasn’t directly under a tree, a telegraph pole, or any masonry. Then you watched your hut to see if it would fall down.

When the earthquake was over, you would walk back towards your hut, the aftershocks making you feel ever so slightly nauseous. Then you would remember to thank God that the earthquake was only a small one, and that the epicentre was a few hundred miles away on the other side of the country, and you would force yourself back to work.

But this was no earthquake. When you concentrated, you realized that the shaking and trembling of the floor of your hut was also accompanied by a deep rumbling sound. You ran outside and you looked across the hills. One hundred and ten kilometres away from where you lived, the great volcano, 5675 metres high, pierced the sky. You had looked at it every day of your life. All through the year, snow coated its pinnacle, despite the near-tropical climate in which you lived. You had heard that it was still active, but everyone knew that it had not erupted for more than a century and a half. The two great volcanoes four and a half hours further west from you regularly smoked, polluting the atmosphere, or so you had heard, with the smell of sulphur, shit, and rotten eggs. But your volcano had always seemed dormant by comparison. Resting. Unhurried.

Now a massive cloud encircled the familiar peak, blotting out the sun. Even from one hundred kilometres away, you began to catch the smell of sulphur on the air. Soon, you sensed, it would be all pervasive, like the smell of a rotting animal in the underbrush.

You followed the course of the eruption in bewildered wonderment. And as you stood there watching, volcanic ash and tiny balls of mud, about a quarter of an inch in diameter, began to patter around you like hailstones. In the distance, thick clouds of black, white, and blue roiled up from the vent, shot through with eerily silent bolts of lightning, as if someone had inadvertently switched off the sound on the village television set.

You had never thought that this would happen in your lifetime. As guardian of the codex – just as your father, and your grandfather, and your great-grandfather had been guardians of the codex before you – you had been preparing for this event for 163 years. Ever since the last eruption. Your family’s only task during that period had been to make sure that no one discovered the location of the cave that housed the codex, or tampered with its contents. That task was completed. Now, your second, and greater, task would begin.

And that task involved a journey to the south. A journey for which you were terminally unprepared.