Several times a week, a nerve-shattering siren reverberates across the island of Montserrat. It is an urgent warning for people to drop whatever they are doing and head north. But there is not much farther north to go, and the terror among local residents is palpable. The Caribbean island's volcano, belching, smoking, fuming for two years now, is giving hints of a cataclysmic blow, as the dark, telltale cloud of white-hot debris shoots high into the sky. "It's the first thing you see when you wake up and the last thing you see when you go to bed," says Audrey White, 51, a farmer who was forced to evacuate her home two years ago and has been living in one of the island's makeshift shelters ever since. "It tears at your soul."
What happens when the siren sounds too late is evidenced by six mounds of freshly tilled soil adorned by simple wreaths. The graves contain the charred remains of local residents who perished on June 25, when the Soufriere Hills volcano spewed 150-m.p.h. molten rivers of lava, gas and ash down its flanks onto the villages below. As farmers tended to their carrot and cabbage fields, huge rocks showered on them and the scorching lava raced over the scalded ground. Ash-filled smoke plunged the land into darkness. There was nowhere to run. Nineteen people died, buried under tons of volcanic slag.
After slumbering for four centuries, Montserrat's volcano awakened two years ago with a vengeance, gradually rendering all but a third of the 39-sq.-mi. British colony uninhabitable. Two-thirds of the population of 12,000 have fled, and thousands more have abandoned their homes, often with little but the clothes on their back, for overcrowded shelters in the comparatively safe northern region. Plymouth, the capital, has been reduced to rubble. The airport is closed, and the only access to the island is by ferry or helicopter.
As the ravenous mountain claims more and more territory, shrinking the boundaries of the safe zone, the once booming tourist destination moves closer to extinction. Towering menacingly above the island, Soufriere Hills erupts periodically, without warning. During explosions, even people in the safe zones wear gas masks and hard hats.
Under the growing pressure of subterranean steam against the mountain's molten core, the volcano's cap could eventually blow out entirely. Montserrat, not much more than a slender arc of farm and beach land surrounding the volcano, could virtually disappear. More likely, the mountain may keep on belching for months or years, slowly smothering the little island. Already it is a paradise lost for its citizens as fewer than 4,000 cling to their homeland. "If everyone leaves," says Radio Montserrat general manager Rose Willock, who lost her home a month ago, "Montserrat will become just another island that was."
In what seems like another lifetime, this lush, mountainous landscape was called the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean, a tribute too to the Irish Catholics who settled there. In the 1970s George Martin, the Beatles' former record producer, opened Air Studios and transformed the Leeward island into a hip playground for the international rock set. Paul McCartney, Sting and Simply Red cut albums there, and exclusive villas dotted the shore.