Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [32]
In any case, very soon people would have more pressing things than us to worry over, very soon our pursuing the Quiet Boy would be forgotten. People’s thoughts everywhere would stretch and expand until they were concerned more with planets than with people.
THERE ARE MANY people on this earth who believe the earth to be solid, who trust the surface that they step upon every day and trust it so implicitly that they scarcely even think of it. Terra firma they call it. But the earth is not to be trusted. There is a mighty subterranean engine beneath us and sometimes that engine vibrates and in those vibrations can be heard a roar, a roar of something that will dismiss any faith in that ground beneath our feet. Cracks open and from somewhere down below terror pours out.
In 1742 in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, an earthquake demolished so much of the beautiful city that town planners considered moving the capital’s site completely. In 1976 in Tangshan, People’s Republic of China, it is estimated that 350,000 people were killed by an earthquake. On 7 December 1988, 25,000 people were crushed to death in an earthquake in Spitak, Armenia, most of them trapped in public buildings, apartment blocks and schools. Schools.
How we pitied the poor schoolchildren of Spitak, as we sat in our own classroom, together at our shared desk, earnestly regarding the walls and ceiling, trying to seek out cracks. The science master, Mr Irt, the whole of the class, the whole of the city even, were speaking of earthquakes again. There had been a tremor on the earth’s surface. Buildings had shaken, a few brick chimneys had collapsed, a few ornaments had jumped down from their shelves to their deaths, but that was all. No serious damage had been caused, and mercifully no one had died. But the aftershocks inside the minds of the people of our city would far outlast the gentle rumbling of that innocent tremor. The younger schoolchildren on Littsen Street, too young perhaps to realise the seriousness of this event, began to scream in the playground, ‘An earthquake! An earthquake!,’ and even, ‘Let’s have another,’ and then, jumping up and down on the tarmac, they yelled out, ‘Come on earth, quake!’
Mr Irt informed our class that seismologists from America had measured the earth tremor. They reported that it was only a minor tremor, that there was still a good deal of stored energy along the fault line on which our city was built. This meant that further earthquakes of a much more serious nature should be expected. When? They could not say. They could guess where and even how violently but not (such is the current failure of the science of seismology) when.
He told us that there was perhaps another way of knowing when an earthquake was about to occur. This method did not involve expensive scientific machinery, this method in fact required only that a person use his eyes. What must he look for? Creatures behaving strangely, fish leaping out of the water, fowls beginning to roost in trees, horses refusing to enter their stables, cats arching their backs and screaming for no obvious reason, dogs beginning to bark and wail though there is no one at the door. Bats, Mr Irt told us, were the most sensitive of all—they began to panic days before the actual quake. Dogs were perhaps the least sensitive, they didn’t sense the danger until a few hours before. Humans didn’t sense it until it was upon them. He made it clear to our class that