The total confluence struck at the second hour after midnight. Just then, the southerly gale that had been gathering behind the Low Karst ridge suddenly crested the limestone bluffs and dropped like an anvil upon the smoldering peat beds of the Great Weeping Fen. For three days the fire had burrowed six feet deep into the dry underground carbon layers, eating roots and old cedar snags in near-silence, sending up only thin gray ribbons of rotten-egg smoke that made the marsh goats cough along the ditch banks. But the gale supplied the missing element. Thousands of tons of high-speed oxygen funneled through the rocky defiles. It drove the heat downward until the peat beds reached auto-starting and boiled out into the open night air as a nonstop wall of orange and crimson fire, twelve feet high and nearly two miles wide.
The front moved with terrifying speed, roaring like an armada of iron ore wagons hurtling down an ungreased incline. The blasting heat preceded the flames by seventy paces. The coarse scrub grass along the ditch verges shriveled, curled into black threads, and burst into flame before a single spark even touched the stems. Ahead of that blazing bright wave lay the Old Willow Clinic—the low, whitewashed granite hospice where seventy elderly marsh dwellers and forty convalescent wagon drivers lay sheltered behind eighteen-inch fieldstone footings.
