as it were, for those beautiful sites, sites which might be termed, if they were acknowledged (for indeed no newsagent will advertise them), Places of Natural Disaster. Such is Schimakin, an area of high toxicity. One day, deep under Schimakin, the earth became angry, so angry that a vein of coal two hundred metres beneath the surface ignited and is still alight to this day. How long will it burn? For ever, some say. And what happened to Schimakin when this vein ignited? Gross destruction. The town that was Schimakin began to collapse—the homes, the shops, the colliery fell apart as if it were a place of paper and cardboard. Land implosion; great rifts on the skin of our country. Streets disappeared into the depths and houses and cars and people with them, to this day nobody knows the exact number of miners that were lost. With the collapse of the terrain came the vile smoke for the first time. Never-diminishing pillars of sulphurous gas, more durable seemingly than marble, can still be seen spewing in vertical jets here and there, north, south, east and west on the land that was once Schimakin. When the vein caught, people sitting in the privacy of their lavatories felt that yellow smoke rising up their naked legs and the next moment, still seated at their bowls, they journeyed deep down, pulled cruelly, to a place where humans should never go. People in their sitting rooms felt the earth hiss and saw their brick walls collapse around them. One second they were standing in their homes, the next their bodies lay crippled in the outside air. But not all the buildings of Schimakin went when the ground beneath them rebelled. Some are still there now, neglected, dirty and rotten certainly, but still there—and what strange angles they stand at. Looking at this tilted town today you might at first believe it to be the work of a drunken architect. Look how the buildings list—one bending, but never quite falling, towards the twisted high street, another, its neighbour, leaning far the other way, perhaps to keep this disobeying land somehow in balance. It seems all the buildings of Schimakin have their own minds; perhaps the houses have argued, they face away from each other so. This is Schimakin. No one lives here anymore, not even the birds come to visit this stinking place, which smokes and hisses and crackles with its still unspent fury. The sky above it is always darkened. And yet for decades after the disaster some of its people remained, refusing to leave their home; life for them was Schimakin. They huddled together in their lopsided world until the poisonous fumes made them lopsided too. Even then, those toxic people, unable to abandon their dead, would not leave. In the end they too died, some it is rumoured by throwing themselves deep down into the ignited mine shafts.
THERE WAS A FEELING in Entralla then that life was shortly to end, that so many of us were shortly to stop, to be stopped, for ever. Irva and I would look at the crowds on Napoleon Street or the Paulus Boulevard and try to guess which people had been selected for termination. We wandered the city and chose people, at the traffic lights, standing in queues in the Central Post Office, shuffling beneath the large wooden Jesus in the cathedral. How many people in our imagination we parcelled out deaths to in those strange days. Some were quiet deaths, some were noisy and angry and frightened and painful. Now as we walked the old town together, we whispered to each other, ‘That one, I think,’ or, ‘He’s going to get it, absolutely,’ or, ‘She doesn’t stand a chance, nope.’ We began to clothe the populace of Entralla with an itching mortality that it had perhaps always possessed but which before had been carefully hidden in lonely rooms at three in the morning or behind the windows of hospitals or old people’s homes. But these now widespread morbid preoccupations, which were to some utterly defeating, to others brought new feelings of determination and excitement. Suddenly, with each new morning, with each new minute more precious than ever before, came a strange