GUATEMALA: Holy Mary

For 27 years the bleak crater of the volcano of Santa Maria has jutted high in the backbone of the Sierra Madre, breathing acrid vapors against the blue Guatemalan sky. Never since the eruption of 1902 has it done much more than that. Planters grew used to the rumblings of Holy Mary, dug through the sterile crust of lava on her flanks to plant coffee bushes in the rich soil beneath. In recent years aviators have used the white plume from her crater as a beacon. Ten days ago Pilot D. G. Richardson, operations manager of the Mexican division of Pan American Airways, flying north on his regular trip from Guatemala to Mexico, swung close to Santa Maria, looked idly down at the boiling lava in her cauldron. Peons working in the coffee shrubberies stopped to wave a feliz viaje (pleasant journey).

Last week Pilot Richardson returned. The smoke over Santa Maria was grey and ominous. For miles around the verdure was burnt and hideous. Pilot Richardson swung his plane lower. Haciendas, coffee plantations had disappeared. The flanks of Santa Maria were streaked with wrinkled beds of steaming lava, moving in ponderous streams toward the sea. In the midst of the lava stream a little hill made an island of refuge. On it huddled a group of the same peons who had waved to him three days earlier, men, women, children. They were completely marooned. Inch by inch the lava stream crept higher. There was no possible escape. Even in the plane the heat was almost unbearable.

In Guatemala City, Pilot Richardson learned more details. Only a few hours of rumbling prefaced the eruption. Three hundred to 400 persons were reported killed. Eight important coffee plantations were destroyed. Red hot lava had buried the village of El Patrocinio deeper than Pompeii.*

Colonel Daniel Hernandez, Guatemalan Minister of Promotion, visited the scene of the eruption at once, approached as close as possible to the lava stream and reported blackened corpses, like raisins on a pudding, carried along on its surface. Came an official bulletin:

“The Red Cross and Boy Scouts have been mobilized. . . . President Chacon has cut short his holiday and returned to take personal charge.”

*Feather-soft ashes, not hard lava buried Pompeii, preserved it.