These (the above, but artfully edited here of swearing etc.) were (approximately) my thoughts as I wandered through Miss Hahn’s strange, little bungalow (the front door was left wide open!), calling out her name, then (having had no success in discovering her actual whereabouts), into the back garden which was a huge, ramshackle affair with astonishing views (natch! View-schmiew! Yeah. Change the damn record why don’t cha?), the shabby lawn peppered with a succession of visible faults (well, to the knowledgeable eye, at least), and then falling, in a succession of dramatic (and patently unstable) steps, down, down, down into the sea far below.

These, in fact, were my thoughts as I tiptoed, very tentatively, across that fractured lawn, finally detecting a very slight and vague – almost inaudible – answer to my call. I was thinking: To be so … so arrogant, so complacent as to believe that it simply won’t happen to you, that it simply couldn’t happen to you. As if all those other poor buggers in the world who …

I’d already decided to tear her off a strip. Yes I had. I really had. I was suddenly livid – perfectly furious. Almost disproportionately so. Was it the …? I glanced around me, tensed, as if waiting for some terrible impact … There was something about the vista, the view, the … the … which suddenly brought to mind … which filled me with a perfectly explicable (yet correspondingly inexplicable) sense of …

Foreboding? Fear? Awe? Déjà vu?

I knew why.

When I finally routed Miss Hahn I planned to tell her about a tragedy I once covered as a reporter in Yungay, Peru, where the whole town had been decimated by a giant landslide of mud and ice and glacial rock after the Ancash earthquake sent a giant chunk of the north section of a nearby mountain crashing down on to it. An American scientist friend of an American scientist friend called Charlie Sawyer had warned the Peruvian press almost ten years before that a giant slab of rock was being worn away by the glacier and threatened to obliterate the town. He and his research partner were promptly driven out of the country under threat of arrest.

Fast-forward to 1970, and 25,000 people were buried alive under that same giant slab. A grand total of ninety-two survived. They didn’t even bother to excavate Yungay in the end, just left it as it was, planting a giant statue of Jesus on top of it, like a demented, Catholic cherry on a stupendous – and completely avoidable – cake of death. In fact I travelled back a few years ago for the ten-year anniversary. I’d made a great Peruvian friend in the area – a wonderful man called Mateo Amaru Mamani Martinez – whose mother actually ran the little boarding house I stayed in on the trip. He was training to be a geologist. His girlfriend (later his wife) and her entire extended family all lived in the town. Every single one of the girlfriend’s relatives (twenty-seven family members, in total) was killed.