A Critical Analysis of 'Real Islam'. Its People ... - Bukti dan Saksi

The sound of the explosion was so loud, so prolonged and so unusual that I knew at once I was
listening to a historic singularity. Indeed, it may not have been an explosion: more a catastrophic global
event. Was it the end of the world? As the initial noise fell in volume, though it did not cease, a
pentecostal wind swept over my house in Notting Hill. It faces north into the street, and the air current
came from the south, as I could see from the trees bending over in our south-facing garden. I was sitting
in my library, in my habitual chair near the French windows, and was astonished to see fallen leaves
plastered on to them and held there by the fierce wind. Then I felt movement. It was not like an
earthquake, which I had experienced in South America. In such tremors parts of the earth's crust crack
and move in relation to each other, to produce disorientation and dizziness. It was, rather, as if the entire
earth moved, as a unit, but out of its regular axis.
Despite the feeling of movement, I went to the bottom of the stairs and began to climb them, up to the
top floor, where a glass door in my bathroom leads out to a flat roof. It was midday, but I became uneasily
conscious that I was ascending not into light but into darkness. There was no disturbance inside the house
and the roof door opened easily. But once I stepped outside I knew I was in a different world, and that the
constants of the old, familiar one had changed utterly. The noise continued but spasmodically, ranging in
its decibels and nature in an erratic and unpredictable fashion. It was now, audibly, the noise of
destruction on an immense scale. The wind, too, came in gusts. I feared the wind. I was beginning to fear
everything. The light, or rather the comparative absence of light, was sinister. To the north, the sky was
blue, yet there was no daylight. The light was thickening. When I glanced south, into central London, I
saw why, and I began to get, for the first time, an inkling of what was taking place.
The whole of the southern view was occupied by a dense, swirling, expanding and ascending column
of smoke. It was many miles wide and already tens of thousands of feet high. Though five miles distant at
its nearest (I guessed), it was moving with great speed, not so much horizontally as vertically. It was
punching a colossal hole in the sky, filling it, then finding fresh energy to punch another, so that at
intervals the column was encircled by giant haloes, stretching out vast distances into the stratosphere. I
could not see the top of the central column. It was covered by one of these haloes, which was now
stretching into the northern portion of the sky, so producing that progressive light reduction I had already
noticed. I call the column smoke, and some of it was smoke — the result of a giant conflagration — but
most of it was dense, throbbing, twisting cloud, white and grey vapour, of the kind emitted by the steamengines
of my childhood but on an unimaginable scale. How had so much water — or whatever it once
was — been turned so swiftly into trillions of square yards of foggy miasma, still piling itself up at high
speed into the stratosphere and beyond? What incalculable force had done this monstrous thing?
As my eye fell to the bottom of the column, I began to grasp the source of its power. A white
incandescence, low by comparison with the column but still perhaps a mile high and 20 or more broad,
filled the skyline of the south horizon. Its fiery heat mitigated the gloom caused by the towering cloud
above obscuring the sun. As my eyes grew accustomed to looking at this radiant epicenter, I saw that it
was composed not only of white-hot elements, but also of fiery red particles, orange and blue flames,
shooting heavenwards like the gigantic tongues which leap out of sunspots thousands of miles into space.
There were also sporadic flashes of white, caused, I assumed, by continuing detonations on a stupendous
scale. The epicenter was spreading steadily; or rather not entirely steadily, for it moved in spurts and
formidable leaps, as well as munching and digesting its periphery. It was alive, this prodigious sore or
cancer in London's heart, expanding its frontiers all the time. It had swallowed and vaporized all
Westminster, and sucked out the entire contents of the Thames and turned them into thick clouds. It had
gone down the river at thousands of miles an hour, engulfed the City and its tall towers, vaporizing steel,
concrete, glass and water as it punched and thrashed and pounded the streets of massive buildings into
nothingness — or, rather, minute particles of its flaming column, surging high into space. Now it was
crumpling and atomizing St James's.
The glittering, searing edge of the immense fire, with its bottomless black crater beneath, advanced
before my eyes, having snuffed out Buckingham Palace and the Mall in an instant, snapped at Mayfair
with cavernous jaws, swallowing it in three rapidly succeeding mouthfuls, while simultaneously
devouring all Belgravia in one tremendous gulp. Appetite unappeased and seemingly unappeasable, it was