On May 8, 1902, a sailor named Matteo di Bat­tista watches from a ship off the coast of Mar­tinique as a cat­a­stro­phe unfolds.

Mont Pelée erupts. A cloud of red ash blots out the sky. Within minutes, the 33,000 inhab­i­tants of the city of Saint Pierre are turned to dust. All except one: Louis-Auguste Syl­baris, a mur­der­er locked up in soli­tary con­fine­ment. The walls of his prison are so thick that even though they crack and shake, they keep out the lava. There is a slit that lets in the light, and burning ash pours through. Syl­baris uri­nates on his clothes and stuffs them into the slit. He remem­bers a Mayan cal­en­dar that names the day of the Apoc­a­lypse and he believes that day has come. Later, once he has uncurled his trem­bling body from the corner of his cell, his screams are heard by rescue workers, Matteo di Bat­tista among them. Syl­baris is burned but able to walk free. He sees nothing but ash float­ing like the feath­ers of ghostly birds. He repents his sins. The sailor di Bat­tista hauls him aboard the ship, tends to his wounds, and writes his story for all eternity.

                                                     ***

On June 20, 1987, Turkey offi­cial­ly rec­og­nizes the myth­i­cal resting place of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat.

Three broth­ers hack at gopher trees, cut them into logs, braid twine with the sapling. Iras­ci­ble Noah watches his sons, barks at them to work faster, turn that lumber. He says, for the fif­teenth time, “Three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide, and thirty cubits tall!” The clouds assem­ble in the dis­tance, casting shadows on the moun­tain. The sun dis­ap­pears. When the flood comes, they are ready, and the ark goes careen­ing into the tumult. Torque and yaw; waves high as hills ravage the ark’s sails, hammer at the mast. Below deck, a rhino’s horn gets stuck in the bars of the cage. Giraffes’ heads bump against the ceiling. Eagles mad as the moon abandon their perches and fly in circles. The toes of the tapirs slide on the floor slick with grimy water. In the midst of the bat­ter­ing, a cacoph­o­ny of hoots and growls and whin­nies breaks out, threat­ens to derange the men and women on board. For forty days it goes like this, the boys vom­it­ing, Noah grip­ping the wheel, strapped to the keelson so he can’t be swept over­board. Great canyons of water rear beside them and the heavens turn black in daytime. Finally, the flood abates and the raven takes wing, as proph­e­sied. Later, the ark will be aban­doned on Ararat in eastern Turkey—where Time will sink the boat into the soil, bury the hull—and be dis­cov­ered by a lost shep­herd boy called Nuh, or Noah.

                                                     ***

In 1487, two monks publish Malleus Malefi­carum, a trea­tise expos­ing the exis­tence of witches. Over the next two hundred years, between 60,000 and 100,000 accused witches are mur­dered in France and Germany. 

They might turn them­selves into pere­grine falcons. Or jack­daws. They might meta­mor­phose into beetles and live out their days behind a book­shelf or a whisky stall. Their accusers say they fly on broom­sticks to for­ni­cate with the devil, cause ship­wrecks, cast spells to cripple chil­dren. The women—healers, spin­sters, widows—wander the back­roads, till one day a teenage girl among them named Lorena Schlaeger dis­cov­ers a network of caves so large it has its own weather system. She leads the women to the caves and they take sanc­tu­ary, ven­tur­ing out only to collect herbs and veg­eta­bles, fruit and fire­wood. And there in a place called the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg they remain hidden among the sta­lac­tites and the hanging bats for a hundred years, with air so rar­efied and water so pure they live into old, old age, waiting it out until the madness of the masses recedes.

                                                     ***

In 1965, Che Guevara, having over­thrown Batista, grows weary of his desk job in Fidel Castro’s gov­ern­ment. He leaves Cuba and goes to the Congo to foment a social­ist revolution.

He is holed up in tiny quar­ters in Dar es Salaam, Tan­za­nia. In neigh­bor­ing Congo, the army officer Mobutu has already over­thrown Kasavubu; Che’s com­rades, Tuma and Pombo, have fled to Europe; and the Con­golese rev­o­lu­tion has fizzled out like a fire­work in the rain. Che sits at his table and begins his second volume of memoirs with the line “This is the story of a failure.” His only human contact is with Pablo Ribalta, who brings him meals of rice and cassava, and Coleman Ferrer, his Cuban typist. Che peeks through the cur­tains, sees the setting sun. Moths circle the lone light­bulb. He will be dead within two years, mar­tyred in Bolivia. The hands that min­is­tered to the sick when he was Dr. Ernesto Guevara, that gripped the rev­o­lu­tion­ary rifle in the Sierra Maestra, that held his wife Aleida in clan­des­tine caress­es in Tan­za­nia, will be cut off and pre­served in formalde­hyde, so his killers can confirm his iden­ti­ty once they have thrown the body into a mass grave, his final sanc­tu­ary.

                                                     ***

Between 1784 and 1822, four hundred and sixty slave revolts occur in the north­east of Brazil. The escaped slaves form quilom­bos—self-suf­fi­cient com­mu­ni­ties, the most famous of which becomes a town called Palmares.

They are a band of the dis­pos­sessed. Bound rags for shoes. Pil­fered scythes and a flint­lock. Eyes full of blood and cinders. They are running from the slave-catch­ers, who chase their scent on saddled horses. The slaves, led by the indomitable women Xuxa and Mar­ilete, cross Per­nam­bu­co and get away. They find refuge deep in the serra, build shacks and post look­outs in the hills. More fugi­tives come, wrecked by their toils and their wan­der­ings, whole fam­i­lies emerg­ing from swamp­lands, repro­duc­ing them­selves like matryosh­ka dolls. They gather around fires, tell stories from the old world. Mar­ilete and Xuxa teach them how to farm patches of land. Xuxa will be burned alive by gov­ern­ment forces, but not before she has spat in the face of General Guil­herme Pachete, who will light the flame with his Cuban cigar.

                                                     ***

Sebatana ha se bokwe ka diatla—“the wild beast’s attacks cannot be stopped by bare hands” (African proverb). Nelson Mandela con­venes a militia and goes on the run. He is named on a U.S. ter­ror­ist watch list, where he remains until 2008, shortly before his nineti­eth birthday. 

The Black Pim­per­nel wears a fedora, a chauffeur’s cap, a crown of thorns. He hides his face behind a beard and glasses. He sleeps clan­des­tine­ly in the back room of a beery shebeen in Cape Town, a bar­ber­shop in Soweto, a sugar plan­ta­tion in Natal. He counts out the days and moves every three. “You can fly out of Jan Smuts but you can’t get back in,” says his handler. The police set up road­blocks, dangle suit­cas­es stuffed with cash for inform­ers, who are every­where, who are in the air he breathes. He makes his way to Lesotho, the Moun­tain Kingdom. Donkeys and dogs, rubble and dia­monds. The Basotho take him for a peasant farmer. He heads to Durban. He gets caught, spends twenty-seven years behind bars, gets out, and lib­er­ates South Africa.

                                                     ***

In Novem­ber 1347, a galley flees from the siege of Kaffa in the Crimea. The ship arrives at the Italian port of Genoa, bearing weapons, goods to barter, and the Bubonic Plague. Within two years, over a third of the pop­u­la­tion of Europe and the Middle East are wiped out.

They have dif­fer­ent names for it: The Black Death, God’s Wrath, End of Days. On the south­ern wall of the clois­ter of the Cim­i­tière des Inno­cents in Paris, an artist paints a fresco of the dance of the dead. God has aban­doned his people. Where is refuge to be found? The land­scape stretch­es bare to the horizon—mass graves circled by buz­zards, desert­ed vil­lages, fla­gel­lants wan­der­ing the coun­try­side. William the Pious leads his con­gre­ga­tion to the hills. Their bodies are dis­cov­ered a century later; one anthro­pol­o­gist says there is evi­dence of can­ni­bal­ism. Janine le Fleur takes her family to live in the cave of Font-de-Gaume. Abou Hamdi Mazry, known as Grey­beard, sees Cairo overrun with rats and in his sermon pro­pos­es an exodus to the desert. He packs sup­plies, but in the middle of his morning ablu­tions notices buboes growing on his skin, and dies drift­ing along the Nile in his brother’s felucca. The plague swal­lows the rich and the poor, the godly and the profane. Sweeps through prisons and monas­ter­ies, man­sions and hovels. Like the preach­er said: “There is no sanc­tu­ary from God’s will. Man came from dust, and to dust he will return, refuge be damned.”