Another Paradise Lost

THE WARNING SIREN BLARES across the Caribbean island of Montserrat shortly after noon, and the British colony suddenly comes to life. The lone road winding north, away from the Soufriere Hills volcano, chokes up with traffic as residents evacuate the ""buffer zone.'' The town of Salem, virtually empty moments before, begins to buzz. In Arrow's, a store owned by Montserrat's best-known musician, clerks are selling ERUPTION T shirts and playing Arrow's CD ""Ah Just Can't Run Away.'' At the corner market, down the road from two churches filled with refugees, old women in head scarves look worriedly at the ash-covered mountain four miles south. A few foolhardy souls venture up a ridge for a closer look. ""She ready to blow,'' says Quincy (Galvanized) Davis, a 22-year-old with a knit Rasta hat and a glint in his eye. ""You ready to run?''

For centuries, the people of Montserrat flourished on the fertile slopes of the dormant Soufriere Hills volcano. When Jimmy Buffett came here to record his 1979 reggae song, ""Volcano,'' locals laughed at the refrain: ""I don't know where I'm gonna go when the volcano blow.'' Why so amusing? It had been 400 years since Soufriere Hills last erupted - the British colonizers who came in 1632 had never seen it happen - and 10,000 years since the last big one. But during the past two years, the volcano has woken fitfully, scorching parts of the southern half of the island and displacing nearly three quarters of Montserrat's 11,000 inhabitants. On June 25 more than 20 people were killed when a massive avalanche of incandescent rock floating on a cushion of gas - what scientists call a ""pyroclastic flow'' - raced across their farmland at more than 100 miles per hour. But that was nothing compared with last week, when the volcano popped its dome like a champagne cork and, erupting every 12 hours or so, sent pyroclastic flows roaring through Plymouth, the island's abandoned capital and only major town.

Up on the ridge now, Galvanized and his friends are listening to the guttural rumblings coming from inside the belly of the volcano. It is 2:36 p.m., and the eruption has begun just when the scientists from the Montserrat Volcano Observatory said it would. Seconds later, a dark, tightly coiled cloud of ash and rock mushrooms over the top of Soufriere Hills. Billowy avalanches - the pyroclastic flows - escape on either side. For an instant, the sight seems as harmless - and as mesmerizing - as time-lapsed images of a flower unfolding. Within minutes, the expanding spirals of dark clouds rise almost 10 kilometers into the sky, and the roiling mass starts to quake and thunder. Over the next hill, the entire Plymouth valley is shrouded in darkness, where the capital is surely getting pummeled again. ""It's a deadly one,'' says Elton, a school-bus driver with a salt-and-pepper beard, keeping his eyes fixed on the mushroom cloud. ""But as big and bad as it is, it's a privilege to see this. None of our ancestors ever saw anything like it.''

Four hours later, helicopter pilot Jim McMahon is flying low over the rain forest toward the zone of destruction, with a NEWSWEEK reporter on board. He zooms along the coast past the expatriates' vacation retreats, the luxurious (and now abandoned) Vue Point Hotel and the lush golf course on Belham River. Popping over the final ridge before Plymouth is like leaving Earth and arriving on the moon. Once a town of quaint beauty - its pastel houses nestled between the turquoise sea and the green flanks of the volcano - Plymouth is now a desolate wasteland drained of all color, life and hope. Some government buildings downtown have been spared - so far. But a whole valley of homes has disappeared under a still-steaming blanket of ash and rocks, including boulders the size of tractor-trailers. The town's sparkling, $20 million hospital collapsed before it was ever used. Left intact, almost cruelly, is the new, $29 million seaport, a monument to the dream of attracting cruise ships to what guidebooks used to call ""the unspoiled beauty of the Emerald Isle.''

The teams of international scientists who have converged on Soufriere Hills say the volcano could continue for months, if not years. ""Right now, this volcano is acting like a Swiss watch,'' says Barry Voight, a volcanologist at Pennsylvania State University. At least until Saturday afternoon, when an expected eruption failed to occur. All week, the volcano's ""breathing'' had been steady, like the contractions of childbirth, erupting every 10 to 12 hours. But were these the birth pangs of a volcano getting ready to deliver the Big One? ""I wouldn't be here if I thought that,'' says Voight (brother of actor Jon Voight), hastening to add that the eruptions could still double in size. ""The baby is already out. The question is whether it will turn into a juvenile delinquent.''

Fear and uncertainty hang over the islanders as thickly as the clouds of volcanic ash. Nearly 7,000 Montserratians have already abandoned the island, many for neighboring Antigua or for Britain, where immigration laws have been eased for the crisis. But officials say Montserrat cannot be economically viable if the population remains under 4,000, even if some mad scientist could guarantee that the volcano would never erupt again. As it stands, Montserrat now has the most aid-dependent economy in the world, with $60 million in donations from Britain during the past two years. (Islanders complain bitterly, however, that very little of that aid has reached them.) Tourism is dead. Unemployment is well over 60 percent. And most of the upper classes have left, taking their capital with them. To raise money for the victims, rock stars Sting, Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney - all of whom once recorded in Montserrat's defunct Air Studios - will hold a benefit concert on Sept. 15 in London's Royal Albert Hall.

Montserrat needs all the help it can get. Of the 4,000 people still on the island, nearly half are homeless refugees who have crowded into tents, churches and schools in the northern ""safe zones.'' At St. Peter's Anglican Church, 48 evacuees sleep on cots amid the pews and pulpits. (They are almost all women and children; many men are too proud to live in the shelters, so they stay on the street.) The refugees get $11 a week in food vouchers, but they lack practically everything else. ""I would like to fly away,'' says Linda Daley, 42, whose only possession now is a little bundle of clothes. ""I love my country, but the mountain is getting meaner.''

Daley should know. She is one of the few who have survived a face-to-face encounter with the volcano's fury. On June 25, she was washing clothes near her home on the volcano's eastern flank. ""I looked up and saw this mighty sea rushing toward me,'' she recalls. It was the front wall of a pyroclastic flow. ""I run and hide and say, "Lord have mercy, I'm gonna die.' Then I felt this surge of heat and saw this great fire above me. It got very dark, blacker than black. I thought I would never see daylight again.'' How did she survive? ""There came a great rushing wind, and God was in that wind because it blew away the heat and the darkness. After the darkness depart, the sun shone like pure gold.'' Daley emerged and saw the pail she had dropped when she ran for cover. It was completely melted.

Montserrat is no stranger to natural disasters; Hurricane Hugo ripped through here in 1989, damaging virtually everyone's home. But the volcano has cast a spookier pall over this verdant island. When the siren sounded again one afternoon last week, the people of Salem came out into the street, some wearing PYROCLASTIC FLOW T shirts. In a shack up the street, a photographer sold spectacular shots of the latest eruptions. But locals seemed more interested in a photo that shows the charred corpse of a man who got caught in a pyroclastic flow. One pressed a copy into a visitor's hand. It is a grim reminder that the volcano is not only beautiful - it is deadly.