5 Chapter 5

We were driving on a paved road. We couldn’t even see the rivers of gray ash that I had seen from above. We couldn’t see the waterfalls of red hot lava feeding the rivers of ash. I could see ordinary fields on the right, ordinary trees along the roadside, and nothing beyond. When I looked at the sky, the white clouds seemed normal; the gray plumes of smoke behind them could pass for storm clouds. But you could smell it, and I was glad I had brought the masks along, both the gauze kind, and the filtering kind in case the sulfur and shards of fine-grained lava and the thin slivers they called Pele’s hair, and other chemicals came near us.