Since all of the world’s oceans were connected, John Edwards knew that in the past, even a relatively mild tsunami in Asia had caused high water several days later in the Thames River in England. He thought of the times he had tossed a stone in the pond to teach his own children about wave movement and the way concentric motion developed. First, there was an upward splash, then concentric waves of water undulating outward from the splash site, then higher water lapping upward over the bank of the pond around its edges. It was an invariable pattern in nature.

The displacement of water caused by the impact of a three-hundred-billion-pound meteor had an effect on the seawater levels all over the world beyond anything that had ever been experienced in history. To be sure, the land mass of South America, North America, and Asia touching the Pacific had felt the full fury of the impact of the meteor. The action in the Pacific caused not only the Indian Ocean to rise, but also the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Caribbean Sea. In fact, all bodies of water connected to the Pacific rose dramatically in the hours after impact.

The damage in the Pacific to life and property was horrible beyond calculation. The flood damage in the rest of the world, John Edwards estimated, would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars. He paused for a moment from his writing. For he realized another horror had been unfolding over the weekend as well—a horror that would affect the earth for months to come—the eruptions of volcanoes all over the world.

“IN ANCIENT DAYS,” John Edwards wrote, “primitive tribes felt that volcanoes were caused by angry spirits. In order to appease these spirits, they devised elaborate rituals and offered sacrifices. Sometimes they even hurled young women into the molten lava in a volcano’s crater to win favor with the savage monster that they imagined lurked within.”

As recently as 1979, President Suharto of Indonesia had taken part in the ritual sacrifice of eighty animals as an offering to the volcano, Mount Agung, by the people of Bali. Modern, urbane Westerners preferred to think that human and animal sacrifices were relics of the past. But John Edwards knew it was not so. “To this day,” he wrote, “the uneducated peoples in rural areas hold an annual festival to offer rice and tonics to propitiate what they perceive as the spirits that lurk behind the fiery caldrons deep in the bellies of volcanoes.”