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Those who had led them onto this ruinous way – or who’d followed them, it varied – were quick to copy them and soon the House of God was filled night and day, ringing out at all hours with the
curé
’s powerful voice recalling the tragic destinies of vile Sodom and Gomorrah, of impure Babylon, of arrogant Babel. Morning, noon, and evening, the altar boys polished the liturgical vessels, which turned black almost before their eyes. The housekeeper had been pressed into service and was watching over the preparation of enough communion wafers in the presbytery kitchen to feed all those starving souls who by the grace of God would be satisfied.
    Writing sermons had never been so easy for Father Blanchot: he just had to look out the window to see whatnew scourge was raging and, inevitably, the Bible would offer him an illustration or a dreadful explanation. Should smoke rise from the crater in the morning, he would announce in a lugubrious voice: “There arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.” Should the flagstone floor tremble beneath the feet of the islanders gathered in the church, he would go on in a voice like thunder: “I beheld when he opened the sixth seal, and lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.” Of course no one had yet seen stars crash to earth, but the mountain spat flying sparks into the night, sending down a disturbing extravaganza of yellow, red, and orange against the blackness of the sky, and at dawn the
curé
trumpeted: “And there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth; and a third of the earth was burned up and a third of the trees was burned up, and all green grass was burned up.”
    But what was most spectacular in his sermon, what he was most proud of, came to him in the form of a swarming mass, a veritable rain of insects beating down on the town. Creatures never before in human memory seen in broad daylight – hairy spiders that lived in burrows, eyeingtheir prey; red scorpions; foot-long millipedes that didn’t hesitate to attack the hens – and others they knew all too well: fearsome carpenter ants, green grasshoppers with legs like twigs, innumerable cockroaches, all came down the mountain slopes to storm the streets of Saint-Pierre.
    Hordes of bats emerged from the darkness of caves at midday to flutter, blind, above the heads of the terrified islanders, sometimes brushing close enough to lift a lock of hair with their crooked fingers.
    Overnight, alleys were teeming with snakes that slipped into the slightest chink between the boards or the stones of houses; and the inhabitants found them in their kitchens, their bathtubs, even between their sheets. People now walked with eyes to the ground, while in the sky the crater kept spitting grey clouds and orange flames. Some talked of seeing hideous reptiles crawl, undulating, into the sea and disappear into the waves; others even swore that snakes had been found coiled up in the holds of ships, hidden among the rigging.
    The
curé
had no doubt: it was unquestionably the Apocalypse. He had witnessed it from the outset, following its progress step by step while its spectacle of fire unfolded before his dazzled eyes. God was speaking to him by showing him how to read in the surrounding countryside the mysterious story that had been transcribed into the sacred texts thousands of years before.The thought filled him with elation when he presented to all, several times a day, the blood of Christ in a chalice that turned black in his hands.
    By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths. And there appeared another wonder in