Spirit of Bikini

Mount Lamington is a 5,534-ft. volcano in the Owen-Stanley range, New Guinea. White residents call it the "Marx Brothers," because it has four cones; natives know it as "Spirit Mountain," from a legend that it once breathed fire.

Airline Pilot Russell Bidulph, flying a C-47 from Port Moresby to Lae, looked down on Lamington. Said Bidulph later: "It seemed to cough, and in an instant there was a Bikini-like cloud above it." In a single blast the whole northern side of the peak had blown up. The black cloud, "full of streaks of red lightning," boiled up to 50,000 feet, mushroomed 100 miles wide. Not molten lava, but pumice dust and hot scoria (like clinkers from a furnace) flew out of the crater, making the earth for miles around too hot to live in.

Eight years ago, Americans and Australians fought the Japanese around Lamington. After the war it became again an area of peaceful coconut plantations, native villages and missions. Seventy whites, mostly Australian government officials and missionaries, and 4,400 natives, all but 400 of them Christians, lived there. When the non-Christian natives recently began predicting that the Spirit Mountain would again spew fire and death, the mission natives scoffed at the "barbarians." But the barbarians went away.

The first rescue teams to fly through the clouds of volcanic ash to an airstrip near Lamington last week reported at least 50 square miles of formerly jungle-clad hills now a grey-brown desert of pumice dust caking into stone. Said one rescuer: "It was like being on another planet...The haze of steam and smoke issuing from Lamington made the whole thing a nightmare." Said Australian Government Official Claude Champion: "Native bodies were everywhere. Dead natives were hanging in the stripped branches of every tree, and many were caught in the forks of the trees. Apparently they died there after they had climbed up to escape from the hot ground." Only 150 natives were found alive, and these were like "walking zombies...You could have peeled the flesh from their bones." There were 35 white survivors, as many dead.

Fearing a second blast, the Australian government ordered all rescuers and investigators out of the area. At week's end the second eruption came, blowing volcanic dust five miles into the air.

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