Caldera Lake Mistake

Wai-ling lay there, calm and quiet. Surrounding her were friends and what was left of her little family. Her little brother was sobbing quietly to himself on one side of the coffin while her husband stood stoically on the other side, trying to instill a sense of gravity to her two little children who were old enough to know something sombre was going on yet weren't old enough to realise what exactly had gone wrong.

Laid atop her casket was the framed photograph of a glorious caldera lake taken from the top of a hitherto inaccessible extinct volcano in Indonesia. This photograph, and this alone, was the reason why Wai-ling was lying in state instead of enjoying her time with her family.

It all started about two months ago. Wai-ling was a professional photographer specialising in taking landscape photographs. Based in Singapore, she made frequent trips to the nearby south-east asian countries to take commissioned photographs of their natural scenery and historical sites. Among the more common countries that she would visit were the Philippines and Indonesia for their distinctive volcanoes.

Wai-ling loved volcanoes. There was something exciting about them, perhaps the entire primeval force that humanity hasn't actually managed to tame, despite spending years of study in seismology. Storms could be mitigated through careful cloud seeding, earthquakes were nullified with stringent building codes, but volcanoes were never controlled---everyone still had to evacuate whenever a volcano had been predicted to be erupting.

National Geographic had approached her about the caldera. They had known about it for years, having done aerial surveys of the region, but they never really had any means of getting there to get a good photograph. The locals treated the caldera as a sacred place, and would therefore actively hinder anyone who tried to ask them for guides up the spot, and the edges of the caldera were high enough that it made a helicopter dropping risky. The approach had to be by land, and Wai-ling was among the foremost who were familiar with the types of terrain that the Indonesian islands would bring up. She had heard of the caldera lake and how beautiful it was, and had always wanted to make a trip out there just for the chance to take a photograph of it, and mostly because no one had actually taken any before.

But it was a tragedy. She managed to hike her way up there based on the topographical maps she had on Indonesia, and take the photographs she wanted. What she didn't count on was a hidden hydrogen sulphide bubble. She was ready to leave when she accidentally caused that bubble to explode, releasing enough hydrogen sulphide to asphyxiate and poison her. It would be a month later when the locals were visiting the caldera to offer their monthly offerings to the mountain gods that the found her body and gear. They knew who she was, and took her back down the caldera lake and arranged for her body to be reclaimed by her husband and family.

(Based on an exercise generated by WriteThis - 07-May-2014 01:00:49)