MARTINIQUE AND ST. VINCENT. 3 6 3 



Pierre. In the same fashion Kichmond is buried, 45 feet deep at its 

 northern end, 3 feet at the southern. In the same way the one 

 masonry building in Kichmond village was. thrown down, and five- 

 foot blocks of masonry blown forty feet away from the mountain. 

 The very odor over the ruin is the same. Just south of the Soufriere 

 there is a group of high mountains. These blocked the passage to 

 leeward southwest, and the heavier material thrown out of the crater's 

 throat accumulated in the basin between these mountains and the 

 volcano. Great drifts of fiery hot sand and gravel fell here and re- 

 mained hot for weeks. The local torrential streams at the beginning 

 of the rainy season, working on these beds, are converted into steam and 

 make spectacular explosions, which alarm the natives, but are really 

 quite harmless. At the sea-front west of the Soufriere there have been 

 submarine landslips on a considerable scale, leaving in some instances 

 vertical earthen walls 50 feet high where before there was a peaceful 

 little village of thatched huts. The sea laps the foot of these un- 

 balanced precipices, and a twelve-foot oar three feet from the strand- 

 line finds no bottom. To a geologist one of the most remarkable 

 effects of such an eruption is the rapid wearing away of the land that 

 succeeds it. The protecting matter of tropical jungle has been burned 

 and buried under two to ten feet of angular sand-grains; heavy rains 

 cut torrent trenches in this material and all the old slopes are suddenly 

 steepened by the falling away of the seashore and the piling of volcanic 

 debris on all the crests of the land. The mountain is soaked in 

 steam and water, local showers are at work all the time, and the result 

 is like playing the hose on a steep mud pie; trenched and rill-marked 

 in every direction, landslides are the rule in such topography and no 

 slopes are safe. I landed for only a few moments to collect a speci- 

 men in one of the deep canyons northwest of Soufriere; a few blows 

 of the hammer started a twenty-foot block of solid rock out of the 

 gulch-slope a hundred yards away, and immediately afterwards a great 

 bank of earth some twenty-five feet high came crashing down only a 

 few feet from me. Needless to say I beat a hasty retreat to the boat 

 from such an unstable land. We learned from this experience that 

 the only safe place on new volcanoes is on the crest — unless one includes 

 the Irishman's position, on 'leave of absence.' 



There are a number of questions constantly asked of a geologist 

 in this field, and some of these I must try to answer briefly here, with- 

 out going further into a description of geological details. Was there 

 any forewarning of the eruptions? Clearly there was; the predic- 

 tion quoted at the head of this article was based on w T ell-authenticated 

 data. At Pelee, the lake in the crater was w T arm, and the smell of 

 sulphuretted hydrogen perceived as far back as January. In April 



