The Thames Valley Catastrophe | Page 4

much debated. I
should guess, thirty feet (though it rose afterwards to more than two
hundred), and it advanced rather faster than a man could run down the
centre of the valley. (Later on, its pace accelerated greatly with
subsequent outbursts.) In frantic haste, I saw or felt that only one
chance of safety lay before me: I must strike up hill by the field path to
Hedsor.
I rode for very life, with grim death behind me. Once well across the
bridge, and turning up the hill, I saw Ward on the parapet, with his
arms flung up, trying wildly to save himself by leaping into the river.
Next instant he shrivelled I think, as the beggar had shrivelled; and it is
to this complete combustion before the lava flood reached them that I
attribute the circumstance (so much commented upon in the scientific
excavations among the ruins) that no cast of dead bodies, like those at
Pompeii, have anywhere been found in the Thames Valley Desert. My
own belief is that every human body was reduced to a gaseous
condition by the terrific heat several seconds before the molten basalt
reached it.
Even at the distance which I had now attained from the central mass,
indeed, the heat was intolerable. Yet, strange to say, I saw few or no
people flying as yet from the inundation. The fact is, the eruption came
upon us so suddenly, so utterly without warning or premonitory
symptoms (for I deny the earthquake shocks), that whole towns must
have been destroyed before the inhabitants were aware that anything
out of the common was happening. It is a sort of alleviation to the
general horror to remember that a large proportion of the victims must

have died without even knowing it; one second, they were laughing,
talking, bargaining; the next, they were asphyxiated or reduced to ashes
as you have seen a small fly disappear in an incandescent gas flame.
This, however, is what I learned afterward. At that moment, I was only
aware of a frantic pace uphill, over a rough, stony road, and with my
pedals working as I had never before worked them; while behind me, I
saw purgatory let loose, striving hard to overtake me. I just knew that a
sea of fire was filling the valley from end to end, and that its heat
scorched my face as I urged on my bicycle in abject terror.
All this time, I will admit, my panic was purely personal. I was too
much engaged in the engrossing sense of my own pressing danger to be
vividly alive to the public catastrophe. I did not even think of Ethel and
the children. But when I reached the hill by Hedsor Church--a neat,
small building, whose shell still stands, though scorched and charred,
by the edge of the desert--I was able to pause for half a minute to
recover breath, and to look back upon the scene of the first disaster.
It was a terrible and yet I felt even then a beautiful sight-- beautiful
with the awful and unearthly beauty of a great forest fire, or a mighty
conflagration in some crowded city. The whole river valley, up which I
looked, was one sea of fire. Barriers of red-hot lava formed themselves
for a moment now and again where the outer edge or vanguard of the
inundation had cooled a little on the surface by exposure: and over
these temporary dams, fresh cataracts of white-hot material poured
themselves afresh into the valley beyond it. After a while, as the deeper
portion of basalt was pushed out all was white alike. So glorious it
looked in the morning sunshine that one could hardly realize the
appalling reality of that sea of molten gold; one might almost have
imagined a splendid triumph of the scene painter's art, did one not
know that it was actually a river of fire, overwhelming, consuming, and
destroying every object before it in its devastating progress.
I tried vaguely to discover the source of the disaster. Looking straight
up stream, past Bourne End and Marlow, I descried with bleared and
dazzled eyes a whiter mass than any, glowing fiercely in the daylight
like an electric light, and filling up the narrow gorge of the river

towards Hurley and Henley. I recollected at once that this portion of the
valley was not usually visible from Hedsor Hill, and almost without
thinking of it I instinctively guessed the reason why it had become so
now: it was the centre of disturbance--the earth's crust just there had
bulged upward slightly, till it cracked and gaped to emit the basalt.
Looking harder, I could make out (though it was like looking at the sun)
that the glowing white dome-shaped mass, as of an electric light,