Paradise Lost

In July 1995, the dormant volcano known as Soufrière Hills on the idyllic Caribbean island of Montserrat erupted so suddenly and violently that the life was never the same again. It was said the sea boiled for three nautical miles around the island, as millions of tons of mud and lava buried the once resplendent Georgian capital of Plymouth. To this day and following further eruptions, most of the island is an exclusion zone, uninhabited and uninhabitable. This photograph was taken from a helicopter, which are permitted to fly over the exclusion zone. The abandoned villas and sugar mills that dot the slopes are being reclaimed by nature, giving the foothills a ghostly countenance. In his epic poem of 1667, Paradise Lost, John Milton captured the essence of the forces whose power is beyond our comprehension: “Into this wild Abyss / The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave / Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire / But all these in their pregnant causes mixed / Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight / Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain / His dark materials to create more worlds”.