Deep Fire Rising

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Standing at the rail of the mail steamer Loudon, the watcher spat into the clear sea and cursed his stupidity as the tropical town of Anjer receded behind the ship. The tower of the Fourth Point lighthouse already resembled a spindle on the horizon.

He should have taken his chances ashore on Java Island when the ship made an unscheduled stop on its way from the Dutch Indies capital of Batavia to Padang on the west coast of Sumatra. Now he was trapped in a race across the Sunda Strait with six hundred other souls, and he alone knew what was coming, what the black clouds roiling on the skyline would bring.

Had he stayed on Java, maybe he could have moved far enough inland to survive the coming days. But he had decided to remain with the ship as it dashed to the Sumatran town of Telok Betong at the head of Lampong Bay. Over the past weeks he had cached food and water in the hills overlooking the bay to witness the approaching cataclysm. That was his job — what he’d been sent to the Dutch East Indies to do — to chronicle what he knew was going to be the greatest natural disaster in recorded history.

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