The story “And of Clay are We Created” is fictional but is based on a true story about a volcano eruption in Colombia in 1985. Sheets of ice surrounded the sides of the volcano, and when the volcano erupted, it melted the ice, causing rock and mudslides to bury villages below the volcano. Over 20,000 people were killed in the catastrophe.
In the story, the volcano erupted, announcing “the end of the world, and walls of snow broke loose, rolling in an avalanche of clay, stones, and water that descended on the villages and buried them beneath unfathomable meters of telluric vomit.” Everything in the villages disappeared and “the houses, plazas, churches, white cotton plantations, dark coffee forests, [and] cattle pastures” were all gone. The avalanche trapped people and animals in the sloppy mud and “desert of mire” that cascaded down the mountain.
It is this natural disaster that brings the story’s reporter, Rolf Carle, to the scene, where he meets the trapped and dying Azucena.
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