boiling column of black smoke. As the flames heated the leaking crude,
so it burned more readily. The bank of smoke was shot through now with
the satanic crimson of high, hot flame.
As Sea Witch sheered desperately away, the first rush of the storm hit
them, and for a moment it smeared the smoke away, exposing the tanker's
high quarter-deck.
Duncan Alexander stood at the rail above the roaring holocaust of the
tank-deck. He stood with his arms extended, and he was burning, his
clothing burned fiercely and his hair was a bright torch of flame. He
stood like a ritual cross, outlined in fire, and then slowly he seemed
to shrivel and he'toppled forward over the rail into the bubbling,
spurting, burning cargo of the monstrous ship that he had built - and
the black smoke closed over him like a funeral cloak.
As the crude oil escaping from the pierced pod tank fed the flames, so
the heat built up swiftly, still sufficient to consume only the volatile
aromatic spirits which constituted less than half the bulk of the cargo.
The heavy carbon elements, not yet hot enough to burn, boiled off in
that solid black column of smoke, and as the returning winds of the
hurricane raced over the Golden Dawnonce more, so that filthy pall was
mixed with air and lifted into the cloud bank of the storm, rising first
a thousand, then ten, then twenty thousand feet above the surface of the
ocean.
And still Golden Dawn burned, and the temperatures of the gas and oil
mixture trapped in her hull rocketed steeply. Steel glowed red, then
brilliant white, ran like molten wax, and then like water - and suddenly
the flashpoint of heavy carbon smoke in a mixture of air and water
vapour was reached in the womb of this mighty furnace.
Golden Dawm and her entire cargo turned into a fireball.
The steel and glass and metal of her hull disappeared in an
instantaneous explosive combustion that released temperatures like those
upon the surface of the sun. Her cargo, a quarter of a million tons of
it, burned in an instant, releasing a white blooming rose of pure heat
so fierce that it shot up into the upper stratosphere and consumed the
billowing pall of its own hydrocarbon gas and smoke.
The very air burst into flame, the surface of the sea flamed in that
white fireball of heat and even the clouds of smoke burned as the oxygen
and hydrocarbon they contained exploded.
Once an entire city had been subjected to this phenomena of fireball,
when stone and earth and air had exploded, and five thousand German
citizens of the city of Cologne had been vaporized, and that vapour
burned in the heat of its own release.
But this fireball was spawned by a quarter of a million tons of volatile
liquids.
. . .
Can't you get us further away? Nicholas shouted above the thunder of
the hurricane. His mouth was only inches from Jules Levoisin's ear.
They were standing side by side, hanging from the overhead railing that
gave purchase on this wildly pitching deck, If I open the taps I will
part the tow wire, Jules shouted back, Sea Witch was alternately
standing on her nose and then her tail. There was no forward view from
