Java's Sulphur Miners of Kawah Ijen

The path meandered through tall grass skirted by thick bushes and young saplings, dew glistened on delicate flowers overhung by branches of pink Hibiscus. The day was fresh and bright, resounding to the morning hum of bees and hover-flies; bowing crickets sang invisibly amongst the foliage as courting butterflies flirted turbulently above. Behind, plantations of coffee stretched away in corrugated shades of jade overseen by a ridge of equatorial forest. It was an idyllic scene, peaceful and beautiful. Yet something was not quite right.

A strange mist flowed between the trees like a ghost river; barely visible but ever present. It looked like the sort of mist you'd expect to see in a rainforest; pierced with gently stirring rods of light that dappled the ground. But looks can be deceptive—for this mist smelt terrible. Silently, it drifted around me, embracing me with its malign sour breath as the path became a lip on the gaping mouth of Kawah Ijen—The Lone Crater.

Volcanoes are much like people, they come in all shapes and sizes. Some, like Mayon in the Philippines and Mount Fuji in Japan, are quintessentially the shape a volcano ought to be, the shape I remember drawing them as a small boy; circular, with sweeping slopes curving up to a conical vent that trailed smoke off into the sunset.

Many volcanoes however, are not so easily seen or recognised, oddly shaped and often cloaked in wooded shrouds they hide their true identities, sometimes for thousands of years.

Nestled on the eastern tip of Java, Kawah Ijen had grown amongst a host of sibling peaks, clustered atop an ancient caldera—a crater so big, that most people don't even know it's there. Concealed by a dense blanket of green, Kawah Ijen was difficult to see, which made my first glimpse of the crater all the more breathtaking. Ringed in vegetation, the fluted silvery rocks swept down to a copper-green lake that shimmered at its heart. Sepia steam poured from the lake's edge, wheeling out of the rocks in an expanding mass that lifted in the hot air. It was as if I had found a lost world, forgotten and undiscovered, until that moment.

I was often drawn to solitary places; hidden spots, secluded and thick with the air of child-spun mystery. Rocky crags, dark pine woods, holly fringed dells, tunnels of tangled roots and a thousand other pages held within the covers of my life—I loved them all, especially the secret ones that were mine, and mine alone. But solitude on a volcano was a mixed blessing; the adventure is always laced with hesitation and unease. For a volcano can never truly be known or trusted—they are, and always will be, essentially omnipotent. Many had died on Kawah Ijen, overcome by the gasses that issued from within. In Indonesia they call volcanoes Gunung Api, which literally means fire mountain, and I had come to explore them, to try and understand them, to feel insignificant and humbled—but I was not prepared to become another statistic. Or perhaps I was?

A gleaming torrent of yellow-white steam tumbled up the crater wall and loomed towards me. My first instinct was to avoid the cloud altogether, but I was not about to turn tail and run, not yet. I could hold my breath or perhaps even breathe the stuff or. . . . But there was little point in guessing what best to do.

The hot sun vanished behind a cloak of acidic fog, as removed from the dawn mists back home as it was possible to be. A cocktail of sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, carbon dioxide and other, equally unpleasant gasses, all mixed as only nature knows how. I sampled the air to see if I could breathe, then rushed to take my T-shirt off and stuff it in my mouth as a makeshift filter. I did all this with my eyes tightly closed, only blinking them open momentarily to see if the alien atmosphere had passed.

A few moments later the toxic shroud folded away as quickly as it had found me, revealing stunted vegetation, tangled and wiry, and covered with a yellowish frosting of sublimed sulphur. Soft, grey rock rutted with narrow gullies radiated from the gaping hole amidst sharp tephra pinnacles and bladed crests. Ahead, the path cut through this miniature canyon-land and disappeared into the void.

A miner sat sheltering in one of these clefts, rolling a cigarette. He smiled as our eyes met, and for a time we sat together talking as-best-we-could, ribbons of smoke peeling from his cigarette as steam peeled from the crater below. Our conversation was as rocky as our surroundings, but it was enough for him to learn something of me and I of him. His face on the other hand, spoke volumes; the sweat on his brow, the tiredness in his eyes, and the same gentle resignation I had seen in others along the way. His baskets were brimming with hunks of sulphur, some oddly shaped like slender stalactites of dripped wax, other pieces dappled with ashen tephra. Some bits were more orange than yellow including a fist sized lump that he handed to me. It was slightly translucent and—my brain clicked with realisation—hot. I had assumed the sulphur mined here was from old deposits, built up over the months and years. It hadn?t occurred to me that it flowing out of the rock as fast as it could be gathered.

Sitting there in the lap of a volcano, I was at once reminded of a schooldays chemistry lesson from twenty years before. We had been given some sulphur in a test-tube, to heat over a Bunsen burner—the room with its dark wooden benches and green vinyl floor seemed so clear, as if it were yesterday. Some things have a habit of rekindling old memories; little things, insignificant for some yet meaningful to others; a smell, a few bars of music, a line of verse, whispered words, a taste, or even a lump of rock. I had marvelled at the colours deepening to blood-orange as the element melted in the flame, and re-solidified, brightening back to its familiar pale lemon yellow, just as the nugget I now cupped was doing from moment to moment. It looked good enough to eat, so—as a joke—I pretended to nibble a corner. "No problem" he said, biting a small chunk from another lump and crushing it between his tobacco stained teeth. I should have known better than to be surprised, but my chin fell open nonetheless, much to my new friend's amusement.

For all their dangerous efforts of collecting, packing and carrying the sulphur out of the crater and down the volcano, the miners only get the equivalent to a few dollars. So I had no qualms about paying him something for the lump, and he had none about taking the money. The deal struck and farewells said, I continued on, carrying the little lump back from whence it had come, not long before.

Tinny shards of sulphur dotted the ground, reminding me of the wild primroses that had splashed the wooded paths of my childhood—magic paths, fringed with fairytale fungus; crimson fly-Agaruc, puff-balls and dripping, shaggy ink caps hidden amongst dark musty woods and secret glades. Paths that had enchanted me from the first, I had been compelled to discover them and they in turn had led me, through time, to the path I now followed into the mouth of an active volcano.

Another miner sat slumped on some lava further down the trail; immersed in fumes he seemed totally overcome and exhausted; topless with head bowed, he weighted motionless for the air to clear. The lost world I had discovered was a harsh one, inhospitable, and full of uncertainty. That anyone would choose to work here was a measure of their need; these men had to work, for food, for shelter, to survive. It was their living.

A slow-motion cascade of acrid steam drifted menacingly up to greet me—then a second wave, and a third. If I lost my footing now I would fall from the foot-worn rock that was little more than a series of ledges, exposed and precarious. Dizzied and feeling sick—my eyes ran with tears, as I struggled to breathe through my T-shirt.

More men emerged from the haze, slowly pacing their way up the cliff, each laden with a heavy load balanced on their shoulders. Jagged lumps of sulphur—some stuffed and bound into sacks, some heaped to overflowing in plaited baskets—but always in pairs, and always betwixt a slender yoke that flexed in rhythm to the bearers strides. I stood to one side as they passed, not wanting to break their focussed effort. They paused just long enough to offer me some sulphur—moving on with a silent smile as they saw the lump I had already bought.

The path ended at a small, flat wooden bridge where I emerged into the sun crunching on a grey carpet strewn with vivid stones and grit. Gleaming yellow coated everything else in a textured crust, bouncing the noon sun painfully onto my skin and into my squinted eyes. Sections of rusty pipe stood on end, as if on guard, and dozens more stretched, end to end, up the rock face spewing with steam. Liquid sulphur trickled from their encrusted mouths, cooling into orange icicles and twisting blades that fed in turn into miniature rivulets and waxy pools. I had seen sulphur stained fumaroles on other volcanoes; smelly holes and cracks lined with delicate crystals of daffodil coloured filigree, but never in large quantities, and never molten. A warm breeze combed the expanding vapours back up the crater face, blanketing the iron pipes as they clasped the rocky slope like so many knuckle-jointed fingers. A moment later the same breeze span around flinging a wall of gas against me, piercing my eyes and stinging my throat. I was choking and suffocating, and could do nothing but crouch and wait while others laboured on nearby.

Several men armed with steel rods, jabbed and teased at the hardening sulphur, prising it from the ground in large irregular chunks. As the steam lifted I spat acid from my mouth. It was basic chemistry—water in contact with sulphur dioxide makes sulphuric acid—simple, and painful too, if the moisture happened to be in your lungs and throat.

The miners had no more protection than I did—faces wrapped swathed in cloth, wearing long sleeved tops and baggy trousers flecked with yellow, and on their feet they wore rubber boots or sandals over tattered, toeless socks. One man even wore a yellow, colour-coordinated, cap. I watched, as he walked up to the hissing mouth of a pipe and delicately snap-off several stakes of sulphur, somehow avoiding the searing gasses that roared inches from his fingertips. He carried them carefully to his baskets balanced on two broken pipes, wedging them down the sides of his already packed load. He vanished amongst the dense vapour like a ghost, as fleeting and ephemeral as the steam itself. He appeared moments later with a bucket of of water in one hand, and in the other what looked like—a bicycle pump. Intrigued, I followed, as he began climbing the steep rock next to the pipes. Carefully he picked his mark and with a slow swing, drew back the bucket and hurled the water onto the rusting lengths. Steam erupted from the baking metal, chilling it, I presumed, to help the condensation of the sulphur within. A minute later he stood at the base of the pipes squirting yet more water at them, this time using the pump. With the stance of a rifleman, one duct after another was showered with a spray of glinting drops, shot twenty metres or more with pin-point accuracy.

There was no machinery here and few tools, not even a shovel; just the odd length of rusty steel clasped between firm hands and supported by strong backs. Kawah Ijen's sulphur is continuous and reliable, but it is modest in comparison to other sources, supporting so many miners gathering one or two loads a day, and no more. Mining other natural resources such as coal or oil is essentially a matter of how to get at the stuff and nearly always involves expensive, heavy equipment. But at Kawah Ijen it was not so much a question of how you get at the sulphur—as how the sulphur gets to you, and not only along the pipes. Sulphur seeped from the rock itself—like pillars of calcite formed in a limestone cave. Stalagmites and stalactites with all the fiery hue of lava grew second by second, and were shattered just as quickly.

Beyond the pipes the yellowed crater wall rose high above the fumaroles in a broad pleated curtain streaked with grey and set against a deep, cloudless and peculiarly purple-tinted sky. Kawah Ijen's crater lake was just as exceptional in its colour, and in other ways too. Turquoise-green and edged in parts by a thin hazy blanket of brown gas, gathered into tinny coves by the wind. Nothing about this lake was run-of-the-mill, least of all—the water itself. To begin with, the water was not actually water at all, it was sulphuric acid; insidiously corrosive, and very, very dangerous. The lake was as deep as the rim was high, run through with a hot, turbulent, and often discoloured plume, rising from Ijen?s submerged vent. Concealing, and impenetrable from above, the lake remained all too vulnerable from below, and on occasions, with an earth rumbling, phreatic cough, shaking the ground and belching forth a surge of ash and gas and hot acid—the volcano has erupted.

The gasses alone are of far greater risk. Silently they emerge from the rocks and the lake, drifting invisibly they haunt the crater, seizing the unwary who drop to their knees—the world spinning then lost in blackness—unconscious before they know what's hit them. If you work here long enough something is bound to go wrong eventually. I wondered how long a person?s lungs could take the corrosive gas before permanent damage was done. Most had lost colleagues and friends, sometimes witnessing them collapse and die before their eyes. I watched as faint wisps of steam twisted out of the acid, dancing with one another as they ran across the surface and faded into the air. But there were no poisonous bubbles that I could see—not today anyway.

Sometimes the crater has been so full of fumes that even passing birds have been gassed in mid-air; shining wings honed to perfection and reduced in seconds to a tumbling ball of dissolving, limp feathers. In fact the lake is so acidic that the rock itself is slowly being eaten away, so that little by little the crater walls are growing thinner. Eventually Ijen's natural ramparts will be breached, releasing the lake onto the land and people below.

The smooth grey lava that I sat on later that day, had been sculpted by a rushing, foaming stream that overflowed from Kawah Ijen. If the crater did give way, this is the direction the lake would come and everything, including me, would be swept away. Naturally the river was yellow acid rather than water, and in the little hollows where the liquid pooled, the air was full of biting, corrosive gasses. The climb out of the crater had been excruciating, with scarcely any reprieve from the fumes or my head, that had felt on the point of erupting itself. Yet the miners I had passed carried more than I weighed on their backs, a feat that seemed impossible.

Kawah Ijen means the Lone Crater, but it is scarcely that, for few volcanoes have such a continuous flow of human traffic. As with so many aspects of these fire mountains, the gifts they offer us—the fertile soil, the hard stone for building, or the native sulphur itself, used for refining sugar and making explosives—are all taken with some risk. I had come to Kawah Ijen because I'd heard it was an extraordinary place, and it was. I had been moved by its beauty, its many dangers, its contradictions, the shear precariousness of life here, but most of all, I had been moved by the people. Ijen's men of sulphur.