A few trucks were lined up on either side of the earthen platform, on top of which loudspeakers blared out exuberant tunes. By now, the fire had overtaken the remaining hills separating it from the river, and was charging down the slope towards the water. There was a moment of silence before the wave of spinning flames crested the final hill. For a second, the sound of convulsing air ceased, and the people felt the scorching temperature fall. The fire was nowhere to be seen. This was because it had just entered the last little valley before the river. The silence didn't last long—with a sound of thunder, the fire leapt back up above the hill, and suddenly no one could hear the tunes from the loudspeakers anymore. They were replaced by an ear-splitting hiss that screeched out the rhythm of the flames' outermost limbs as they flailed through the air, rising, rising, rising up into the sky, until it seemed they couldn't possibly go any higher without coming undone from the flame trunks that just about kept them anchored to the ground. If they kept on climbing, they would surely find a place in the sky to float, where they could turn into the end-of-day gloaming and slowly dissolve. The humans were all fighting for breath, but their struggle to respire didn't interfere with their entranced stares fixed on the airborne dance of the flames. The fire's unutterable power to destroy also contained within it beauty on the largest scale; the kind of beauty that found easy resonance in the impetuous hearts of the people of this tumultuous era. All around, people whooped in joy to see the mad, joyous flight of fire!
From high in the sky, the fire ripped the substance from the air below it, all the way down to the valley floor. Starved of oxygen, the people only felt their bodies thrill in the pleasure of low-level asphyxiation. They wanted to rise up too, to join the flames in the sky—they craned their necks up, and stood up on tip toes, willing themselves upward in a drunken atmosphere of dream-faced, glaze-eyed insanity.
However, as was also true for many other events of that era, this feeling of lightness, of joyous flight, could not last forever. The considerable weight of the flames' substance guaranteed a limit to their upward trajectory—eventually, that dizzying limit was reached, and like a monstrous ocean wave that has reached its crescendo, there was nothing left for the fire to do but come crashing down. A heavy horizontal front of boiling air blasted over the river, flattening to the ground the people who a moment ago were perked up on tip toes.
The air ripped and cracked more savagely than before.
The mighty fire wave has collapsed! It has fallen on the steep swathe of forest by the riverbank! The riverside trees didn't catch fire one by one in any kind of orderly fashion; the blaze took them all at once, by their hundreds, turning their huge canopies into so many dazzling fireballs. With the canopy conquered, the fire turned its attention to the forest's lower reaches, spreading itself wildly in all directions.
The forest fire burned with such abandon that soon the narrow valley's air was empty, sucked hollow. Now, the fire itself began to suffocate. With one final, furious flare of energy, the flames shrunk, revealing the trees after their first licks of fire. Their highest parts were scorched a burnt black, but below that, their branches and leaves had actually come out of their first roasting, greener and fresher looking than before. The fire kept shrinking, and shrinking, until it seemed it was on the verge of burning out. All the people who had been pummelled to the ground slowly caught their breath, but as soon as fresh, new air poured into the valley, the flames snarled back into life, exploding outward from inside some tree or other. Before the people could blink, the bright ocean of fire had re-established itself above the forest! Forget about the trees, now even the air felt ready to explode!
The humans were as helpless to breathe as if someone had them by the throat. Once more, they were flattened against the ground by a powerful surge of energy. Some of them courageously stood up and tried to wave their fists at the fire, like the heroes do in war films, but they found they couldn't even lift their hands into the air—instead, they clutched at their chests and went straight back down.
Thus, the fire-fighting army was routed—it fled the double-ended river valley in both directions along the road. The troops stopped only once they reached a place where the air had not yet been sucked up and stolen by the fire, which had now descended from the forest canopy and was blazing on the riverbanks. It suffocated itself for a second time. When it flared back up, its lush treetop stomping ground was in tatters, unable to feed the wild fire dance any longer. So, the fire dragon dived down towards the earth. One after another, the thousand year growth of ancient trees came to an abrupt end, as they burned from the bottom up. The fire's advance slowed—now it looked more at its leisure, and yet also more determined to win. Most of the trees stopped burning once their branches and leaves were gone, except for the sappy pine trees; when their branches were gone, the barren trunks only burned more fiercely.
It didn't seem possible that sap alone could cause such violent explosions; there must have been gunpowder stuffed inside those trees, too. A blinding, unending chain of fireballs flashed from inside the trees, shooting out burning wooden fragments that whizzed through the air in all directions. Once in a while, whole fireballs propelled themselves outwards from the tree trunk they had just ripped apart—the pine tree explosions were becoming so violent that some of the fireballs actually flew right across the thirty or forty metre-wide river to land on the other bank, where they ignited fresh parts of the forest.
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