Word: lava
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...that he was about to become the owner of a volcano. He had been negotiating for the purchase of Paricutin, the volcano which poked through the cornfield of Mexican Farmer Dionisio Pulido, on Feb. 20, 1943, and quickly grew into a 1,500-ft. mountain, belching flame, smoke and lava. This week the cartoonist, after delicate and mysterious negotiations, expected to clinch the deal...
...Dionisio Pulido, plowing his cornfield, suddenly felt the ground rumble and saw a great column of white smoke burst from the ground. He ran to the priest in the village of Paricutin, two miles away. By the time priest and villagers arrived, the crater was belching molten rock and lava. In a week it had raised a cone 500 feet high; in ten weeks, 1,000 feet. Then lava, erupting from the crater's top and sides, began to ooze over the countryside...
Goodbye Parangaricutiro. A black, craggy pile, the moving lava constantly cracks chunks off its crust, exposing a gooey, glowing mass underneath (temperature: 1,994° F.). Its approach sets houses afire. Traveling about seven yards an hour, the glacier-like ooze has already spread more than seven miles and engulfed two villages-Paricutin and Parangaricutiro...
Volcanologists feel sure that when Paricutin burns itself out, as it eventually must, it will stay dead, like other old volcanoes in the vicinity. Then the cooling, mineral-laden lava will become extraordinarily fertile...
...honest poet has no choice, however, but to show the illusion-loving man-in-the-street that today the beauty he dreams of has become a Wellsian, moonlit scene of desolation-a "lava plateau . . . fissured with chasms" and dotted with extinct volcanoes. Instead of a credible faith, this frozen land offers nothing but a thousand contradictory ways of life, centered around the false face of "the huge stuffed bird of happiness" and the "black stone on which the bones are cracked." Only "among the ruins and the bones" can man hear "the real Word which is our only raison...