Under the Volcano

When Mount Pelee suddenly erupted on the Caribbean island of Martinique on May 8, 1902, a huge cloud of steam and volcanic dust killed 30,000 people, leaving a solitary prisoner in an underground dungeon as the only survivor. So when the long-dormant La Soufriere volcano on nearby Guadeloupe, a French territory, recently began rumbling and belching ash and gases, authorities ordered the immediate evacuation of more than 72,000 residents from towns and villages in the vicinity of the 4,812-ft. volcano. TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich flew to the island and ventured up to the crater. His report:

La Soufriere, haughty, elusive, has a quality of mystery, and perhaps never has it been so mysterious as now. While the administrative capital of Basse-Terre was bathed in tropical sunshine on the coast below, La Soufriere (meaning sulfur mine) remained swathed in a turban of clouds and made its own rain.

Signs along the road up to the crater warn of toxic gases, projectiles and landslides. But over the years islanders have built their houses amid the rain forests on the mountain's flanks. As a retired clerical worker from Basse-Terre put it: "We did not fear it." When the volcano suddenly began spewing out a fine volcanic ash two weeks ago, officials decided it was time to act.

Early Sunday morning, to the sound of church bells, the evacuation began. Small pickup trucks, cars and buses clogged the roads to the adjoining island of Grande-Terre. Some residents were taken out by sea. And some others, participants in the Tour de Guadeloupe bicycle race, left on their bikes. "Most people didn't wait to pack," said Pierre Renaison, 52, a biologist. "They left with just the clothes on their backs."

Twenty-four hours after the last evacuee struggled past the roadblock into the safety zone, the island was shaken by an earthquake that measured 4 points on the Richter scale. There were reports that the volcano might erupt at any moment with the force of a 350-kiloton nuclear explosion. The next day Professor Robert Brousse, 47, a burly volcanologist from the University of Paris, flew in an Alouette III helicopter over the volcano to see if it had begun to erupt. "We were over the sea when suddenly the cloud into which we were about to fly turned out to be a cloud of ash from the volcano," he said. "I can tell you we got out of there fast."

Emptied of human life, Basse-Terre now resembles the post-atomic spectacle of the movie On the Beach. French Tricolors flutter unattended in the breeze. The traffic lights are still on, but jammed on red or green. Goats wander the streets and chained dogs howl in hunger. Others, having broken their bonds, forage in the grounds of the Saint-Claude Hospital. A large poster in Basse-Terre announces that the Tivoli Cinema is showing Hell Is Empty. Yet in the town of Saint-Claude, halfway up the slopes, there remains one elderly couple that refuses to leave. Says Dorome Cherize, 61, as she munches on a mango: "I stay here till I die. If the mountain blows, the country disappears. I stay here."

Swirling Clouds. From the tourist car park, it is a 20-minute hike to the crater. The air is gray and the knee-deep ash has turned to mud near the summit. Suddenly, out of the swirling clouds a line of seven helmeted and yellow-coated scientists appears. They are picking their way down the volcano's side after an inspection tour. "The odds now are that it will not become destructively active," ventures John Tomblin, 37, a scientist with the Seismic Research Center in Trinidad-Tobago. But, he laughs, "that's mainly a guess."

The volcano is still just smoldering. By week's end farmers were complaining that the livestock they left behind would starve. Some were let through police barricades to feed their animals or lead them to safety. Housewives were protesting a sudden increase in the price of vegetables, which used to be harvested on the slopes of La Soufriere. And in the shadow of the smoking mountain, everyone waited.

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