Many years later I discussed this phenomenon with a vulcanologist at the Mt. Etna station. He explained that the heat building up at the base of Rakata must have spread across the ocean floor and raised the temperature so high that the fish were driven onto the land in their attempts to escape. That was much later. At the time I thought it was some sort of pollution.
Markoloua left, having traded the bêche-de-mer for ten (10) tin mirrors. Next morning the first blowups came, four of them in succession, and it was the ending of the world. I didn’t hear the noise, it was too loud to hear, I felt it, an accoustical battering that made me scream. The entire north end of the island went up in a mushroom of lava. The main cone of Rakata was split down the middle, exposing the central shaft. The sea poured into the molten interior, was instantly transformed into live steam, and blew up in another series of explosions that crumbled the rest of the cone.
I was hammered by the noise, blinded by the smoke, suffocated by the livid vapors, slammed out of my senses, and there came that tidal wave of lava creeping toward me like a swarm of red-hot caterpillars. I could feel nothing but the wild incredulity of death shocking through my body. I knew. I knew what nobody believes until the extreme moment. I knew I was dead. And so I died.
Actually it was the vibrations of the explosions that produced the miracle. They burst the withes that bound the bamboo walls of my warehouse and twisted the stems into a birdcage, a logjam with myself inside incorporated with wooden debris; and then the quakes must have blasted me out into the ocean. I was not aware of it at the time; I only realized it later when I was reborn, floating in a caul of bamboo on the surface of the sea.