“I’m frightened, Mr. Onoda! I’m tired. I can’t walk. I’m cold. Please let me get on the helicopter.”
“No,” he said, gently moving her away from the helicopter. “That’s for the sick and injured. Don’t worry. A big helicopter will come soon and take all of us.”
He gestured to the pilot, and the helicopter lifted off with a roar and a still stronger blast from its rotor.
“Does anybody know this girl?” he asked after the helicopter had gone.
“Nobody here, sir,” answered one of them. “I was with her group. Another one, my friend, went in the helicopter, and the fourth one died. He was her boyfriend, and my friend and I never met them before this.”
“All right,” said Onodera, taking hold of Mako’s arm and supporting her, “let’s get into the cabin.”
“What do we do now, sir?” one of the youths asked.
“We wait,” he answered, looking at his watch. It was 7:35.
“How long, do you think?”
“I don’t know. A big quake and tidal wave hit the Kansai Region this morning. Hundred of thousands of people were killed. We have perhaps a fifty-fifty chance that they’ll be able to send a second helicopter for us.”
“And if they don’t?”
They had reached the cabin door. Onodera stopped before going in and looked back at the windswept ridge. “Well, three have been saved anyway, and we will have had a chance to get to know each other.” Ignoring their varied reactions, Onodera helped Mako to lie down on a cot and then turned his attention to the wireless set he had taken from the helicopter.
“Let’s take a look at your map. If worse comes to worst, we’ll have to try making it out on foot.”
Just then the radio began to sputter. The voice was Sergeant Tomita’s, but it was hard to make out. Onodera pressed the receiver to his ear and spoke into the microphone as he balanced the set on his knees.
“This is Shirauma. It’s Onodera. Sergeant Tomita, do you hear me?” Onodera repeated the question again and again. Finally his expression brightened. “Cheer up, gentlemen,” he said after he had put down the microphone. “A helicopter’s leaving Matsumoto in about a half-hour.”
Though they had little strength left, the youths gave a hoarse cheer.
Onodera raised a warning hand. “It’s not coming direct but by way of Nagano. So we have a good hour and a half to wait yet.”
Before Onodera had finished speaking, however, the earth began to groan and the cabin began to creak as it rocked back and forth. A dull booming sound echoed through the mountains. Onodera bent quickly to pick up the radio, which he had put back down on the floor, but as he was lifting it up, a second shock hit the cabin, and he collided with one of young men, whose arm knocked the set from his hands. Before it struck the floor, however, a transmission came through marred by terrible static: “Attention ... emergency warning ... Norikura is on the verge of eruption.”
There were explosions that sounded like fireworks and then a cannonlike booming that seemed to reverberate through one’s whole body.
“An eruption!” shouted someone in a shrill voice.
“It’s started. We can’t get away.”
“Take it easy,” said Onodera. “Norikura’s way to the south.”
“No, it’s here. There’s another Norikura, and it’s right above us.”
Onodera glanced at his watch. It was 7:45. Outside there was a rumble as though the very axis of the earth had been shaken. One youth ran outside.
“It’s water,” he cried as the thunderous rumble grew louder. “Water’s coming down the slope.”
“It’s from Shirauma Lake,” said a tall young man quietly, his face white.
“We’ll get swept away!” somebody shouted. “We’d better run.”
“Wait,” commanded Onodera. He shouted to the boy outside: “Where is it going?”
“It’s all right,” the boy answered. “It’s turning toward Ume Pond.”
Onodera went to the door and looked out. The muddy water mixed with snow rushed down the slope close to the cabin with the force of a cascade, sending up a spray of snow and water. From time to time it would strike a rocky outcropping, and a plume of muddy water would spurt skyward. The mountains around echoed and re-echoed its deep rumble, and the valleys below, from which the mist was starting to rise, seemed to tremble. Part of the flow, arching like a waterfall, was falling into a crevice that had opened just below. Gradually its rumble subsided, but the sinister explosions and the roar that came from beyond the ridge line did not grow any less. Suddenly Onodera threw away his half-lit cigarette and sniffed the air. He could smell sulfur.
“Let’s go. We’ll go north of Akakura and down to Otani. It’s our only chance, and we should be able to make it.”
He rushed out of the cabin and drew an arrow in the snow with his foot. Beside this he wrote: “To Otani.” The wind would probably blow it away before the helicopter came, but with a wind like that no helicopter was likely to come anyway. He looked up to see Mako’s bright jacket in the midst of the windblown group that had come out of the cabin. He went over and took her by the arm.
“I can’t walk,” she said, sobbing. “I’m freezing ... let me die. The helicopter won’t come, will it?”
“Come on now. Pull yourself together and walk. If you fall down, I’ll pick you up.”
Fighting the wind-driven snow, they made their way across an open meadow and then began their descent of the east slope by means of a ravine. The sulfur smell grew more intense.
Heavy mist was rising from the Itoigawa Ravine in front of them, hiding the Togakushi Range on the other side. A chill suddenly ran through Onodera.
“Sir, look at that!” came a shrill voice behind him. “There’s fire behind the mist over there.”
Red flames tinged the dirty gray mist that was covering the sky, and as the ever present rumble of the earth grew louder yet, a second layer of flame appeared below the first, and a curtain of inky black smoke began to blot out the little brightness left to the sky. What was falling around them was no longer small rocks falling down the sides of the ravine but a steady rain of still-warm volcanic fragments.
Onodera stopped in his tracks and stood gazing at the red hell seething behind the mist. The sulfur smell had been in front of them, not behind them. It had been coming from Mount Togakushi.
“Sir, what are we going to do?” a youth beside him screamed as the hot ash poured down on them.
On April 30 at 8:03 A.M. Mount Takazuma in the Togakushi Range erupted with an explosion that blew off its crest. And an instant later there began that series of eruptions that tore open twelve distinct craters along the western slopes of the Togakushi Range.