Darkness
Posted on Sunday 26 March 2006
| I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went -and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chilled into a selfish prayer for light; And they did live by watchfires -and the thrones, The palaces of crowned kings -the huts, The habitations of all things which dwell, Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed, And men were gathered round their blazing homes To look once more into each other's face; Happy were those which dwelt within the eye Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch; A fearful hope was all the world contained; Forests were set on fire -but hour by hour They fell and faded -and the crackling trunks Extinguished with a crash -and all was black. The brows of men by the despairing light Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits The flashes fell upon them: some lay down And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled; And others hurried to and fro, and fed Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up With mad disquietude on the dull sky, The pall of a past world; and then again With curses cast them down upon the dust, And gnashed their teeth and howled; the wild birds shrieked, And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawled And twined themselves among the multitude, Hissing, but stingless -they were slain for food; And War, which for a moment was no more, Did glut himself again; -a meal was bought With blood, and each sate sullenly apart Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left; All earth was but one thought -and that was death, Immediate and inglorious; and the pang Of famine fed upon all entrails -men Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh; |
The meagre by the meagre were devoured, Even dogs assailed their masters, all save one, And he was faithful to a corse, and kept The birds and beasts and famished men at bay, Till hunger clung them, or the drooping dead Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food, But with a piteous and perpetual moan, And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand Which answered not with a caress -he died. The crowd was famished by degrees; but two Of an enormous city did survive, And they were enemies: they met beside The dying embers of an altar-place Where had been heaped a mass of holy things For an unholy usage: they raked up, And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath Blew for a little life, and made a flame Which was a mockery; then they lifted up Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld Each other's aspects -saw, and shrieked, and died - Even of their mutual hideousness they died, Unknowing who he was upon whose brow Famine had written Fiend. The world was void, The populous and the powerful was a lump, Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless - A lump of death -a chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still, And nothing stirred within their silent depths; Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea, And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped They slept on the abyss without a surge - The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, The Moon, their mistress, had expired before; The winds were withered in the stagnant air, And the clouds perished! Darkness had no need Of aid from them -She was the Universe! — "Darkness" by Byron 1816 |
Byron wrote this apocalyptic vision — "a dream, which was not all a dream" — on the shores of
Lake Geneva during the aftermath of the Napoleonic war. 1816
was a year of great displacement and instability, of sweeping reaction and reprisal as the old feudal interests
sought to reassert their ancestral rights and overthrow Napoleon's reforms. It was
also a year in which many people, both superstitious and rational,
began seriously to wonder whether the sun — the central player in Byron's poem
— really was in the process of dying.
The weather was strange. Instead of the long stretches of balmy days expected of summer, the countryside was being alternately deluged with torrential rains or blanketed with snow! The rains swelled the rivers and lakes which in turn burst their banks. Bridges were washed away and roads vanished under the floodwaters. Drowned animals became a common sight floating down the waterways and people began to to die of hunger as agricultural production collapsed by as much as three quarters. Grain doubled in price and then it doubled again.
As the year wore on to the next, famine became
widespread and food riots broke out across Europe. In Switzerland, where the violence was at its greatest, the authorities declared
a state of emergency. Huge quantities of grain were imported grain from the Russian Empire (which had surprisingly enjoyed a
bountiful harvest that year) and from the United States, which
had also suffered from inclement weather (especially in the Northern
states which had experienced snowstorms in July). The
famine of 1816-17 drove a wave of European migration both to the
East and to the West. In the United States, it prompted farmers to abandon
large areas of New England for the Indian-held lands of the
Mid-West.
Snowstorm by Joseph Mallord William Turner
As it turned out, the unusually high level of sunspot activity had nothing to do with it. The sun was not in fact dying and proper summers returned to Europe by 1819. The cause of the cold snap, now known variously as the "Famine Year", the "Year without a Summer" and "Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death", was a series of volcanic eruptions, the most important of which having occurred at Mt. Tambora the previous year.
The eruption at Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies (over 12,000 kilometres away from Lake Geneva) was the most violent volcanic eruption in nearly two millennia and quite possibly the most violent one to have occurred in the previous 75,000 years. It was at least four times more powerful than the famous Krakatoa and blew upwards of a 150 cubic kilometres of ash into the atmosphere. The mountain, which today stands at around 2,500 metres in height, is thought to have been at least 4,000 metres high before the eruption. Over 100,000 Indonesians perished, 10,000 from being in close proximity to the volcano and the remainder through starvation and disease.
Completely extinguished was the Kingdom of Tambora [1], a small but fiercely independent population that once lived on the slopes of the volcano. The Tamborans, whose language was described by contemporaries as similar to that spoken on the western end of neighbouring Flores and different from the other two linguistic groups on the island. They were by no means an "easygoing people" and were known to be "brusque and short-tempered". They were constantly in a state of low level conflict with their neighbours and this was something which clearly exasperated the Dutch administration in Batavia. A century before, the Dutch had exiled the reigning Rajah of Tambora to the Cape colony in South Africa [2] however, even after installing their own choice of monarch, they still found it difficult to control this troublesome people who continued to engage in struggles and intrigues against the island's other factions [3].
This all came to an end in 1815 when when Tambora exploded and the kingdom was swept away in a tide of molten rock and poisoned gas. A legend endures which seeks to explain the disaster at Tambora and the reason for the kingdom's destruction.
Apparently it was all caused by a dog.
Once upon a time, a visitor from another island came to the kingdom of Tambora.Let that be a salutary lesson to all those who wish to abuse the rules of hospitality!
He went to the local mosque, in the capital town of Tambora, for prayers. As it happened, the king and his retinue were there also at prayer, but the king had brought a favourite dog with him into the mosque.
The visitor was upset by this, and spoke loudly and widely against it in the town that day. Word got back to the king, and he bade the visitor to come dine with him. During the meal, unknown to the visitor, the king had the man served pieces of the dog cooked to seem like one of the courses the others were eating.
The next day, the visitor heard in town the evil the king had done, and he became very angry and denounced the king.The king heard of this, and ordered his guards to seize the visitor, take him up the mountain, and kill him on the spot. Which they did.
As they walked down, they noticed smoke started rising from the place where they committed the murder.
After two years of small low level eruptions, the mountain exploded killing everyone.
[1] Recent excavations at Tambora seem to confirm that the Tamborans traded quite widely in the South East Asian region. Fragments of pottery, especially of porcelain indicate that they had trade connections as far away as Indochina.
[2] The earlier Rajah of Tambora, Abdul Basir, after spending a few years in detention in South Africa was released briefly only to be rearrested in 1713. He had been back in Sumbawa and once again engaging in activities displeasing to the Dutch authorities. This time they decided to exile him permanently and he spent the rest of his life confined to the estate of the Govenor at Capetown. During his time there, he famously produced a copy of the Koran entirely from memory and presented the book as a gift to the Govenor. It was the very first Koran in South Africa. The Dutch had a policy of restricting the spread of the Islamic religion — especially amongst the black slaves — and the book is unlikely to have ever left the grounds of the estate. The Rajah's Koran has now, unfortunately, been lost.
The Rajah's descendants never returned to Tambora and after the Rajah's death they converted to Christianity. They assumed the surnames de Haan and Sultania and joined the mainstream of Afrikaner society. Piet Retief, one of the leaders of the Afrikaner Voortrekkers, is said to have been a direct descendant of the Rajah of Tambora.
[3] Some of these details about the Kingdom of Tambora were gleaned from this collection of quotes and dispatches drawn from various historical sources about Sumbawa.
Afterthought: The Indonesians have always lived in awe of the gods that inhabit the chain of active volcanoes that punctuate their archipelago. One of these gods, the one that inhabits Gunung Tambora, must also have been some kind of modern-day Prometheus because, as with his Greek predecessor, this god gave to mankind something that was new and lasting.
The gift of Gothic horror.
