Preface to all three posts: As pleased as I am with the warm reception of my first novel, I have, over the course of the past year, been engaging in a massive re-write. As I continue to slave away on this, I have worked hard to do something which, for me, is very challenging. Specifically, to throw away content (particularly when I'm fond of it). Still, it's for the good of the novel as a whole, so I am disposing of three "vignettes" sprinkled throughout the first version. For the sake of posterity, and mostly because I want some eyeballs to read these before they are tossed into the dustbin, I present one of them here:
Seventy thousand years ago, in the midst of the Barisan Mountains on the island of Sumatra, the volcano Mount Toba exploded with a force and violence that homo sapiens had never experienced. Nearly seven hundred cubic miles of ash and lava were hurled onto the land and into the sky and, over the course of the eruption, six billion tons of sulfur dioxide spewed into Earth’s atmosphere.
None of the one hundred thousand humans scattered across a far-away continent could see the blast, but the volcano’s indirect effects would be felt soon enough. As the soot and poisonous gas billowed into the atmosphere and enveloped the planet, the temperature began to drop precipitously, and acid rain drenched the land. As the protective ozone layer disintegrated from the sky, ultraviolet rays were suddenly able to find their way to the planet’s surface, as well as the skin and eyes of the humans living in their only home, Africa.
During the volcanic winter which came forth and then set in for years to come, the humans began to die off, one by one, often in agony. The darkened skies, poisoned precipitation, and plunging temperatures around the planet strangled away all the normal conditions which allowed plants and animals to thrive. In turn, desperate men and women found nourishment increasingly hard to find, and those who managed not to succumb to starvation were instead struck down by blindness, cancer, or other maladies of their newly hostile world.
This single distant eruption of a faraway mountain may well have snuffed out the entire species were it not for a tiny but fortunate sliver of humanity that happened to be near the ocean coastline. Near the water, the humans at least had the moderating effect of the currents to counter the frigid air, and enough freshwater springs and nearby sea life that could be scavenged to survive. Following the worst depths of the catastrophe, a mere thousand humans had managed to survive the bewildering nightmare that swept across the entirety of the enormous planet.
Those one thousand hardy souls were the fathers and mothers of all generations yet to come, yet no record would exist among them of how close they came to vanishing forever. The facts of the catastrophe were preserved only within the stone of the planet. As for the individual memories of that near-extinction, those would die off along with every soul who had managed to survive the worldwide cataclysm. Never had humanity come so perilously close to being just another buried memory of Mother Earth.
