III explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Nature and the Sublime

  The earthquake is described as Heaven's last, most terrible card, and Emily feels she has survived something dangerous and sublime. The tropical landscape, with its palms, fireflies, and oppressive heat, evokes both awe and foreboding.

• Childhood Innocence and Morality

  The children's reaction to the earthquake—dancing, riding into the sea, barking like a dog—shows their innocent, unselfconscious joy. Emily's shock at the Fernandez children's barefoot state highlights her internalized moral codes.

• Colonial Decay and Imperial Decline

  The neglected stone gateway, the overgrown avenue, and the ramshackle estate of the Fernandezes suggest the decline of colonial infrastructure and the fading grandeur of empire.

Characters to notice

• Emily Thornton

  Exhilarated by the earthquake, she dances, rides a pony into the sea, and feels she has survived the ultimate adventure. Later, she is shocked by the Fernandez children's barefoot unconventionality.

• John Dodson

  Catches Emily's excitement, turns head over heels on the sand, swims after her, and later tells disproportionate stories about Ferndale's importance.

• Margaret Fernandez

  Claims she could smell the earthquake coming, argues with Jimmie about smells, and leads the cavalcade to Exeter Rocks. She is barefoot and unconventional.

• Jimmie Fernandez

  Argues with Margaret about her claims of smelling things, and comments that earthquakes make hens lay eggs.

• Harry

  Proudly tells John about Margaret's ability to sort clothes by smell.

• Mrs. Thornton

  In two minds about letting John and Emily visit the Fernandezes, worried they might learn bad ways.

Key passages

• “Heaven had played its last, most terrible card; and small Emily had survived, where even grown men (such as Korah, Dathan, and Abiram) had succumbed.”

  Emily felt that God had unleashed the ultimate catastrophe, yet she, a small child, had lived through it while even biblical figures had perished.

  Emily's grandiose sense of having survived the ultimate adventure.

• “How funny Creoles were! They didn't seem to realise the difference it made to a person's whole afterlife to have been in an Earthquake.”

  Emily thought the Creole children were odd because they didn't understand how profoundly an earthquake changes a person's life.

  Emily's cultural superiority and her view of the earthquake as a transformative experience.

• “They lost some of the traditional mental mechanism of Europe, and the outlines of a new one began to appear.”

  Creole families gradually shed European ways of thinking and started developing a distinct cultural mindset.

  Narrator's observation on the cultural evolution of Creole families in Jamaica.