Just before dawn

 
“The words we have just spoken,
Time, in its flight,
Has already swept them away, and nothing returns.”

Odes, Horace, version by Giulio Galetto

Slowly, Igniatius believes he remembers, yet they are only fragments of sensations giving rise to something resembling a memory… Entangled roots emerge in a murmur and tell him something that reminds him of other things…
— It is supreme folly to see life as it is and not as it ought to be… Things are only what we are willing to believe they are.
— A memory, certainly, he thinks, but which one? Am I thinking, or perceiving?
One thing leads to another, and at this pace an entire journey reveals itself to him.
— We had reached the archipelago just before dawn… I remember…
For several days already, the horizon had been stained with a grey haze that seemed neither cloudy nor marine: it was ash suspended in the air. Toward the southwest, skimming the sky, stood strange silhouettes—not clouds, but peaks, cones, cliffs. I soon recognized, by their tapered shape and their jagged alignment, the signature of a volcanic chain. It was with a mingled feeling of awe and dread that I understood we were about to set foot upon lands still in formation, where the crust of the world has not yet finished hardening.
Landing was difficult, for the constant swell leaves no inlet calm. The main island possesses no beach, only rocks as sharp as blades of black flint on which the surf crashes with rhythmic fury. One climbs literally onto the stone as one would storm a fortress. I stepped onto ground still warm in places, cracked, and oozing from its fissures a sharp, briny vapor.
I ventured alone into the interior, guided solely by the instinct of the geologist. This soil, though barren at first glance, speaks like an ancient tongue. It tells me everything: the burst of lava, the layering of ashes, the explosive ejections followed by the slow agony of fire. I measure inclines, observe the grain of the scoria, collect a fragment of red tuff from a fault.
And yet, it is not science alone that moves me here. It is the rare sensation of witnessing the world in one of its moments of creation. As though the Earth, that morning, were still writing its own geological alphabets. I saw basaltic flows petrified in shapes reminiscent of a wave folding back upon itself. I saw caverns carved by colossal bubbles of gas, frozen by the lava like hollows of blown glass. I even found, on a wall sheltered from the wind, a small fleshy aloe—the island’s only plant—rooted in a damp crevice where the gulls may have been leaving their guano for generations.
When evening came, I climbed to a promontory overlooking the entire archipelago.
From there I could behold the procession of the islands. Some are nothing but smoking black cones; others seem collapsed in on themselves, like shattered skulls. The water steams in places where thermal springs empty into the sea. I thought I heard, in the low rumbling beneath my feet, the lament or the song of these islands still becoming.