THE POMPEII OF THE EAST - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 4

became one of the first victims of the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human
history.
Within hours, the village of Koteh, along with all other villages on the Sanggar peninsula,
ceased to exist entirely, a victim of Tambora's spasm of self-destruction. This time three dis-
tinct columns of fire burst in a cacophonous roar from the summit to the west, blanketing the
stars and uniting in a ball of swirling flame at a height greater than the eruption of five days
before. The mountain itself began to glow as streams of boiling liquefied rock coursed down
its slopes. At 8:00 pm , the terrifying conditions across Sanggar grew worse still, as a hail of
pumice stones descended, some “as large as two fists,” mixed with a downpour of hot rain
and ash. A decade after the event, a native poet from Bima described the horrific scene:
The mountain reverberated around us
As torrents of water mixed with ash fell from the sky.
Children screamed and wept, and their mothers, too,
Believing the world had been turned to burning ash. 12
On the north and western slopes of the volcano, whole villages, totaling perhaps ten thou-
sand people, had already been consumed within a vortical hell of flames, ash, boiling magma,
and hurricane-strength winds. In 2004, an archaeological team from the University of Rhode
Island uncovered the first remains of a village buried by the eruption: a single house under
three meters of volcanic pumice and ash. 13 Inside the walled remains, they found two car-
bonized bodies, perhaps a married couple. The woman, her bones turned to charcoal by the
heat, lay on her back, arms extended, holding a long knife. Her sarong, also carbonized, still
hung across her shoulder. She had been interrupted by fiery death while at a mundane do-
mestic task—preparing the evening meal—much like the petrified figures of women, children,
and household pets at Pompeii already famous in the early nineteenth century. The Tambora
woman's charcoal state, however, is evidence of immolation at far higher temperatures than
those generated by Vesuvius in AD 79.
Back on the mountain's eastern flank, the rain of volcanic rocks gave way to ashfall, but
there was to be no relief for the surviving villagers. The spectacular, jet-like “plinian” erup-
tion (named for Pliny the Younger, who left a famous account of Vesuvius's vertical column
of fire) continued unabated, while glowing, fast-moving currents of rock and magma, called
“pyroclastic streams,” generated enormous phoenix clouds of choking dust. As these burn-
ing magmatic rivers poured into the cool sea, secondary explosions redoubled the aerial ash
cloud created by the original plinian jet. An enormous curtain of steam and ash clouds rose
and encircled the peninsula, creating, for those trapped inside it, a short-term microclimate
of pure horror.
First, a “violent whirlwind” struck Koteh, blowing away roofs. As it gained in strength,
the volcanic hurricane uprooted large trees and launched them like burning javelins into the
sea. Horses, cattle, and people alike flew upward in the fiery wind. What survivors remained
then faced another deadly element: giant waves from the sea. A British ship cruising offshore
in the Flores strait, coated with ash and bombarded by volcanic rocks, watched stupefied as a
twelve-foot-high tsunami washed away the rice fields and huts along the Sanggar coast. Then,
as if the combined cataclysms of air and sea weren't enough, the land itself began to sink as
the collapse of Tambora's cone produced waves of subsidence across the plain.