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Meanwhile, the Cameroon army struggled to navigate bulldozers over the precipitous mountain climbs and into the villages to dig graves for the dead livestock. But the primitive dirt tracks, which provide the only access to the hamlets for some 40 miles around, were muddied by pelting rains. Therefore the burials were slowed considerably while troops laboriously dug the graves by hand. Officials began to fear that the bloated carcasses of cows, goats, pigs and chickens rotting in the equatorial heat would lead to a cholera or typhoid epidemic. Army efforts were further hampered by the handful of survivors who refused to leave their lifeless villages. In Cha, Kumba Ndongabang sat beneath a thatched platform, staring at the two graves where his five wives are now buried. "All my women die," he grieved, his voice rising and falling with the simple rhythms of the native Pidgin English. "If I go, who make home for me? Where I go? Where I find home? Where life?"
Despite government efforts to seal off the remote villages, a few local tribespeople insisted on returning at midweek to the lands farmed by their ancestors. Their homecoming could not have been a happy one. As the Rev. Fred Tern Horn, a Dutch priest who serves in the area, described the scene, "it was as though a neutron bomb had exploded." All of the huts and buildings remained intact, and the mountains and tropical forests appeared unscathed. But almost no life stirred for miles around.
Lake Nios, affectionately dubbed the "good lake" by local residents, no longer shimmered a welcoming blue. Instead, the waters had turned a drab shade of reddish-brown, clay having been churned from the lemon-shaped lake's depths. The village that shares the lake's name showed no signs of life, save the rescue crews. Of the hamlet's almost 1,200 residents, only four, including a woman and her child, are believed to have survived. Five miles away in Su- Bum, army troops found a scrawny chicken dancing a macabre two-step atop a freshly dug family grave. "All the people, the goats, the pigs and the cows died," said Lieut. General Tataw. "What surprises me is how that chicken survived."
More miraculous, so did a handful of villagers who haltingly recounted the tale of the poisonous cloud. Sometime between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Aug. 21, families were finishing their evening meal and settling down for the night when the volcanic lake bed erupted. Some villagers remembered hearing a distant sound. Then a strange odor permeated their huts. "It was like burned gunpowder," suggested one survivor. Another likened it to "eggs, bad eggs." When villagers began to feel dizzy, panic set in. People who were not killed immediately fled into the dirt streets. Many were later found in the bush, their hands vainly clasped over their noses and mouths.
Even the few who survived were knocked unconscious for what they believe was hours. When they awoke, they found the nightmare had only just begun. "Oh, they die plenty!" cried Peter Sam Kinbi, 42, of Su-Bum. "You go to one compound, and they all finished. You go to another compound, and there is one man and maybe one child living. They all dead. When you touch them, they be like stone and they be white spot (dried spittle) on they mouths and on the ground. My wife, my six children, all dead."