Ashes In The Snow Book Quotes

I need a book that says 'Here's how to defeat Spring and restore power to your king, and while you're at it, here's how to prove you matter when no one else thinks you do—” I stop. I'm staring at the bookshelves and not at Theron, and I don't think I'll ever be able to look at him again without shriveling up from embarrassment. I can still hear what I said hanging around me, my weak, weak admission, and I can't bring myself to breathe, let alone face him. Theron doesn't give me a choice. He crawls up onto his knees and moves into my line of sight, his forehead wrinkled and his eyes darting over mine like he's trying to figure me out the same way he figured out that passage. After a moment of silence, he grimaces. “You matter,” is all he says.

Books in towering stacks lean against the fireplace and on small end tables, and crowd the bookshelves so tightly I fear the entire structure will burst in an explosion of paper and dust. They're the large books too, great archaic things that look so old, so fragile, that I worry I might disintegrate them just by breathing too hard.

You’re impossible,” I growl, and rip open the book. Theron laughs and scoots a little closer to me. “Impossible, endearing. Synonyms, really.

His face is close to mine, his hand warm against my back through my shirt. Despite the smile on his lips, his gaze is so sad it feels like my heart is ripping in two, turning to ash as I look at him. He knows as well as I do that neither of us is leaving Avon alive if we touch down again. He’ll never see snow, and I’ll never teach him what skis are.

The library door is already open when I dash in, but the room is empty. Books line shelves three floors high, and windows just as tall let in rays of dying sunlight. Three balconies wrap above me and a grand piano stands in the center of the bottom level, but there are no people, not even a servant dusting old books in a corner.

A sadist with a sense of humor was particularly dangerous.

of Jamie. God, how could I do it? Leave him

I said I was a virgin, not a monk,” he said, kissing me again. “If I find I need guidance, I’ll ask.

To see the years touch ye gives me joy, Sassenach,” he whispered, “—for it means that ye live.

knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.

Rares claps his hands. “When you’re finished, dear heart, feel free to leave the books on the table, as disorganized as you possibly can.” He motions to a table behind me, situated in a break in the rows of books. “The librarian in residence in charge of the Library of Clarisse is an offensively irritable man, and I would like nothing better than to make unnecessary work for him.

Blood of my blood,” he whispered, “and bone of my bone. You carry me within ye, Claire, and ye canna leave me now, no matter what happens. You are mine, always, if ye will it or no, if ye want me or nay. Mine, and I wilna let ye go.

For I had come back, and I dreamed once more, in the cool air of the Highlands. And the voice of my dream still echoed through ears and heart, repeated with the sound of Brianna’s sleeping breath. “You are mine,” it had said. “Mine! And I will not let you go.

Roger was on the whole rather glad that her father was not present, since he would certainly have taken paternal umbrage at the sorts of thoughts Roger was thinking; thoughts

Nothing moved on the surface but faint coruscations of starlight, caught like fireflies in a spider’s web.

thinking I meant to snatch this treat for myself, but I pushed

They’re girls,” she replied briefly. “They were born in danger and will live their lives in that condition, regardless of circumstance.” But

The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman. Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy

For I give ye my spirit, ’til our life shall be done.

I thought that was perhaps how some ghosts were made; where a will and a purpose had survived, heedless of the frail flesh that fell by the wayside, unable to sustain life long enough. I

You can’t make a horse do anything. You see what he’s going to do and then you tell him to do that, and he thinks it’s your idea, so next time you tell him something, he’s more likely to do what you tell him.

people will treat with disdain such phenomena as are proved by the evidence of the senses, and commonly experienced—while they will defend to the death the reality of a phenomenon which they have neither seen nor experienced.

These were people like that. The ones who cared so terribly much—enough to risk everything, enough to change and do things. Most people aren’t like that, you know. It isn’t that they don’t care, but that they don’t care so greatly.

Are some people destined for a great fate, or to do great things? Or is it only that they’re born somehow with that great passion—and if they find themselves in the right circumstances, then things happen? It’s the sort of thing you wonder, studying history … 

What a mystery blood was—how did a tiny gesture, a tone of voice, endure through generations like the harder verities of flesh? He had seen it again and again, watching his nieces and nephews grow, and accepted without thought the echoes of parent and grandparent that appeared for brief moments, the shadow of a face looking back through the years—that vanished again into the face that was now.

I was crying for joy, my Sassenach,” he said softly. He reached out slowly and took my face between his hands. “And thanking God that I have two hands. That I have two hands to hold you with. To serve you with, to love you with. Thanking God that I am a whole man still, because of you.

Be careful, Sassenach,” he said, still grinning. “Ye dinna want to knock off any more pieces; ye’ll only have to stick them back on, aye?

tri-gravida, well-nourished

All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a

Well, ye’re kind, too,” he said, considering. “Verra kind. Though ye are inclined to do it on your own terms. Not that that’s bad, mind,” he added,

BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS

I relaxed my grip on the knife; she could hardly attack me with a lapful of goat.

Marketing with a small baby was more like a ninety-minute expedition into Darkest Borneo, requiring massive amounts of equipment and tremendous expenditures of energy.

BILIOUS HUMOURS

fact been no more than a small skirmish between the MacKenzies and a detachment of English troops on their way to join the main body of the army. Said army was even now assembling

They

met with you.” “Captain Randall said you were stealing cattle,

the good man’s only singularity lies in his approving welcome to every experience the looms of fate may weave for him,

I drew a deep breath and sighed, shaking my head. “I do not understand men.” That made him chuckle, deep in his chest. “Yes, ye do, Sassenach. Ye only wish ye didn’t.

There are only two people in this world to whom I would never lie, Sassenach,” he said softly. “Ye’re one of them. And I’m the other.

Mo nighean donn,” he whispered, “mo chridhe. My brown lass, my heart.” “Come to me. Cover me. Shelter me, a bhean, heal me. Burn with me, as I burn for you.

Until we two be burned to ashes.

take some attention, aye?” He drew the sticky tip

You are my baby, and always will be. You won’t know what that means until you have a child of your own, but I tell you now, anyway—you’ll always be as much a part of me as when you shared my body and I felt you move inside. Always. I can look at you, asleep, and think of all the nights I tucked you in, coming in the dark to listen to your breathing, lay my hand on you and feel your chest rise and fall, knowing that no matter what happens, everything is right with the world because you are alive. All the names I’ve called you through the years—my chick, my pumpkin, precious dove, darling, sweetheart, dinky, smudge … I know why the Jews and Muslims have nine hundred names for God; one small word is not enough for love.

Seeing them, Jamie reached for a remnant of bread, and tossed it with considerable accuracy into the middle of the flock, which exploded like shrapnel, all fleeing the sudden intrusion.

up, no?” said Ian soothingly. “Come now, mi dhu, ye shouldna worrit yourself, it’s bad for the babe. And the shouting troubles wee Jamie too.” He reached out for his son, who was whimpering, not

May God make safe to me each step,             May God make open to me each pass,             May God make clear to me each road,             And may He take me in the clasp of His own two hands.

People often say that women forget what childbirth is like, because if they remembered, no one would ever do it more than once. Personally, I had no trouble at all remembering. The sense of massive inertia, particularly. That endless time toward the end, when it seems that it never will end, that one is mired in some prehistoric tar pit, every small move a struggle doomed to futility. Every square centimeter of skin stretched as thin as one’s temper. You don’t forget. You simply get to the point where you don’t care what birth will feel like; anything is better than being pregnant for an instant longer.

usually went to the trouble of separating these from their original possessors before presenting them to me—but then the fur stirred, and a pair of bright eyes peered out of the tangled mass. “My dog’s hurt,” the man announced brusquely. He set

Snow was falling, and winter had come; the season of fire. Candles and hearth fire, that lovely, leaping paradox, that destruction contained but never tamed, held at a safe distance to warm and enchant, but always, still, with that small sense of danger.

Whither thou goest,’ ” I said, “ ‘I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.’ ” Be it Scottish hill or southern forest. “You do what you have to; I’ll be there.

How old was Jem when he finally learned to tell jokes? You remember how he got the form of jokes but didn’t really understand the idea of content?” “What’s the difference between a … a … a button and a sock?” she mimicked, catching Jem’s breathless excitement to a T. “A … BUFFALO! HAHAHAHAHA!

Doom, or save. That I cannot do. For I have no power beyond that of knowledge, no ability to bend others to my will, no way to stop them doing what they will. There is only me. I shook the snow from the folds of my cloak, and turned to follow Maisri down the path, sharing her bitter knowledge that there was only me. And I was not enough.

AMONGOL, KNOCKED INTO a cook fire during the initial surge of horsemen, had lived long enough to run—shirt and hair on fire—into the rows of tents. Rutger assumed he had died from the burns, but before he had expired, the flames had leaped from him to several tents. The fire was spreading, and a haze of ash and embers was starting to fill the air. A storm of glittering snow.

Does he—is he one who knows what he is, do you think?” Claire’s hands stilled, the clanking pestle falling silent. “Oh, yes,” she said. “He knows.” “A laird? Is that what you’d call it?” Her mother hesitated, thinking. “No,” she said at last. She took up the pestle and began to grind again. The fragrance of dried marjoram filled the room like incense. “He’s a man,” she said, “and that’s no small thing to be.

Before the day drew to a close, slushy snow began to fall. In the blink of an eye, the ash-gray streets of the old town were erased into whiteness. A whiteness that seemed too perfect to be real, showing up the shabby figures that moved against its canvas, their threadbare cloaks of ordinary hours. Like them, she walked without stopping. Through beauty that would disappear - was disappearing already. Mutely.

her small white dog Bouton hurrying at her heels to keep up. A far cry from the fluffy lapdogs so popular with the ladies of the Court, he looked vaguely like a cross between a poodle and a dachshund, with a rough, kinky coat whose fringes fluttered along the edges of a wide belly and stumpy, bowed legs. His feet, splay-toed and black-nailed, clicked frantically over the stones of the floor as he trotted after Mother Hildegarde, pointed muzzle almost touching the sweeping black folds of her habit. “Is that a dog?” I had asked one of the orderlies in amazement, when I first beheld Bouton, passing through the Hôpital at the heels of his mistress. He paused in his floor-sweeping to look after the curly, plumed tail, disappearing into the next ward. “Well,” he said doubtfully, “Mother Hildegarde says he’s a dog. I wouldn’t like to be the one to say he isn’t.

I kept havin’ terrible lewd dreams about ye, all the night long,” he explained, twitching his breeks into better adjustment. “Every time I rolled over, I’d lie on my cock and wake up. It was awful.” I burst out laughing, and he affected to look injured, though I could see reluctant amusement behind it. “Well, you can laugh, Sassenach,” he said. “Ye havena got one to trouble ye.” “Yes, and a great relief it is, too,” I assured him.

William paid little heed to what was said, his own attention distracted by the sight of two slender white figures that hovered ghostlike among the bushes at the outer edge of the yard. Two capped white heads drew together, then apart. Now and then, one turned briefly toward the porch in what looked like speculation. “ ‘And for his vesture, they cast lots,’ ” his father murmured, shaking his head. “Eh?” “Never mind.” His father smiled,

According to the vicar, many of the local folk thought the War was due in part to people turning away from their roots and omitting to take proper precautions, such as burying a sacrifice under the foundation, that is, or burning fishes’ bones on the hearth—except haddocks, of course,” he added, happily distracted. “You never burn a haddock’s bones—did you know?—or you’ll never catch another. Always bury the bones of a haddock instead.

It was a time, two hundred years ago …” It’s always two hundred years in Highland stories, said the Reverend Wakefield’s voice in memory. The same thing as “Once upon a time,” you know. And women trapped in the rocks of fairy duns, traveling far and arriving exhausted, who knew not where they had been, nor how they had come there. I could feel the hair rising on my forearms, as though with cold, and rubbed them uneasily. Two hundred years. From 1945 to 1743; yes, near enough.

I’m afraid my wife picked up a number of, er, colorful expressions from the Yanks and such,” Frank offered, with a nervous smile. “True,” I said, gritting my teeth as I wrapped a water-soaked napkin about my hand. “Men tend to be very ‘colorful’ when you’re picking shrapnel out of them.” Mr. Bainbridge had tactfully tried to distract the conversation onto neutral historical ground by saying that he had always been interested in the variations of what was considered profane speech through the ages. There was “Gorblimey,” for example, a recent corruption of the oath “God blind me.” “Yes, of course,” said Frank, gratefully accepting the diversion. “No sugar, thank you, Claire. What about ‘Gadzooks’? The ‘Gad’ part is quite clear, of course, but the ‘zook’.…” “Well, you know,” the solicitor interjected, “I’ve sometimes thought it might be a corruption of an old Scots word, in fact—‘yeuk.’ Means ‘itch.’ That would make sense, wouldn’t it?” Frank nodded, letting his unscholarly forelock fall across his forehead. He pushed it back automatically. “Interesting,” he said, “the whole evolution of profanity.” “Yes, and

I thought Dougal MacKenzie taught Jamie to fight left-handed,” I said. I rather wondered what Jenny thought of her uncle Dougal. She nodded, licking the end of a thread before putting it through the eye of her needle with one quick poke. “Aye, it was, but that was later, when Jamie was grown, and went to foster wi’ Dougal. It was Ian’s father taught him his first strokes.” She smiled, eyes on the shirt in her lap. “I remember, when they were young, auld John told Ian it was his job to stand to Jamie’s right, for he must guard his chief’s weaker side in a fight. And he did—they took it verra seriously, the two of them. And I suppose auld John was right, at that,” she added, snipping off the excess thread. “After a time, nobody would fight them, not even the MacNab lads. Jamie and Ian were both fair-sized, and bonny fighters, and when they stood shoulder to shoulder, there was no one could take the pair o’ them down, even if they were outnumbered.” She laughed suddenly, and smoothed back a lock of hair behind her ear. “Watch them sometime, when they’re walking the fields together. I dinna suppose they even realize they do it still, but they do. Jamie always moves to the left, so Ian can take up his place on the right, guardin’ the weak side.

He thinks of Tyndale in the bleach fields, his human sins whited-out, speaking from within a haze of smoke. He thinks of the river at Advent, its frozen path. There is a poet who writes of winter wars, where sound is frozen. The soil beneath the snow seals in the noise of stampeding feet, the clank of harness, the pleas of prisoners, the groans of the dying. When the first rays of spring warm the ground, the misery begins to thaw. Groans and cries are unloosed, and last season's blood makes the waters foul. Now Tyndale has put on the armour of light. On the last day he will rise in a silver mist, with the broken and the burned, men and women remaking themselves from the ash pile: with Little Bilney and young John Frith, with the lawyers and the scholars and those who could barely read or read not at all but only listen; with Richard Hunne who was hanged in the Lollards Tower, and all those martyrs from the years before we were born, who set forth Wyclif's book. He will clasp hands with Joan Boughton, whom he, the Lord Privy Seal, saw burned to bone when he was a boy. In those blessed days the whole of creation will shine, but till then we see through a glass darkly, not face to face. Somewhere - or Nowhere, perhaps - there is a society ruled by philosophers. They have clean hands and pure hearts. But even in the metropolis of light there are midden and manure-heaps, swarming with flies. Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.

can hardly blame ye for not waiting.” I could see Ian in profile, leaning over the log basket. His long, good-natured face wore a slight frown. “Weel, I didna think it right, especially wi’ me being crippled …” There was a louder snort. “Jenny couldna have a better husband, if you’d lost both legs and your arms as well,” Jamie said gruffly. Ian’s pale skin flushed slightly in embarrassment. Jamie coughed and swung his legs down from the hassock, leaning over to pick up a scrap of kindling that had fallen from the basket. “How did ye come to wed anyway, given your scruples?” he asked, one side of his mouth curling up. “Gracious, man,” Ian protested, “ye think I had any choice in the matter? Up against a Fraser?” He shook his head, grinning at his friend. “She came up to me out in the field one day, while I was tryin’ to mend a wagon that sprang its wheel. I crawled out, all covered wi’ muck, and found her standin’ there looking like a bush covered wi’ butterflies. She looks me up and down and she says—” He paused and scratched his head. “Weel, I don’t know exactly what she said, but it ended with her kissing me, muck notwithstanding, and saying, ‘Fine, then, we’ll be married on St. Martin’s Day.’ ” He spread his hands in comic resignation. “I was still explaining why we couldna do any such thing, when I found myself in front of a priest, saying, ‘I take thee, Janet’… and swearing to a lot of verra improbable statements.” Jamie rocked back in his seat, laughing. “Aye, I ken the feeling,” he said. “Makes ye feel a bit hollow, no?” Ian smiled, embarrassment forgotten. “It does and all. I still get that feeling, ye know, when I see Jenny sudden, standing against the sun on the hill, or holding wee Jamie, not lookin’ at me. I see her, and I think, ‘God, man, she can’t be yours, not really.’ ” He shook his head, brown hair flopping over his brow. “And then she turns and smiles at me …” He looked up at his brother-in-law, grinning. “Weel, ye know yourself. I can see it’s the same wi’ you and your Claire. She’s … something special, no?” Jamie nodded. The smile didn’t leave his face, but altered somehow. “Aye,” he said softly. “Aye, she is that.” Over the port and biscuits, Jamie and

In all honesty, the story plays out this way because (bear in mind that I wrote it for practice and never intended to show it to anyone, let alone try to publish it) I’d read several romance novels in which the heroine was threatened by rape or actually raped—and having already decided in a moment of whimsy that Jamie should be the virgin bridegroom…I sort of shrugged and said, “Hey, turnabout’s fair play….

Personally, I love lists. They’re very soothing. You usually write them slowly, so they’re tidy-looking even if you don’t have good handwriting. They also give you a sense of reassurance that you really do know what you’re doing, and they incite the pleasant delusion that Things Are Under Control. Unfortunately, once I’ve written a list, I find that I don’t want to do anything on it.17

a poem called “Duan Na Muthairn,” or “Rune of the Muthairn.” These were drawn from a collection by Alexander Carmichael called Carmina Gadelica, published in 1900, which was at the forefront of the Gaelic revival movement of the time period. The song is performed in Gaelic by Raya Yarbrough. In English, the text means: Thou King of the moon, Thou King of the sun, Thou King of the planets, Thou King of the stars, Thou King of the globe, Thou King of the sky, Oh! lovely Thy countenance, Thou beauteous Beam.

When the entrance was open, thousands of years ago, an expedition was sent to retrieve magic. According to legends and a few of the more legible lines in the book, the magic sat in the center of an endless cavern, a great ball of energy snapping and crackling as it hung in the negative space of the cave. To be removed from the cave, the magic needed a host, an object imbued with its powers. The great ball of energy pulsed around the cavern, striking rocks here and there like uncontrollable, chaotic fingers of lightning. And the rocks it struck became infused with magic. So monarchs started leaving other objects close to the source, waiting for the bolts of magic to strike swords or shields or jewelry and fill them with power.

didna want the lad to go back wi’ him. It wasn’t only I’d promised his grannie, either. Jenny told me about the lad’s back.” He hesitated. “I’ll tell ye, Sassenach. My father whipped me as often as he thought I needed

minutes later you can’t move. Diesel from the locomotive has sprayed into the carriage, you can hear the roar of the flames, passengers screaming, you try to free yourself, but to no avail. In the snow beneath the rails passengers from the rear carriages file past. You can hear the flames approaching your seat, you are trapped and can only wait until the fire reaches you. Outside, flakes of ash settle on the snow. Soon the first ambulances arrive. You can smell melting plastic, you can smell burning diesel. You sit there unable to move, in the escalating heat, until it becomes unbearable and in your helplessness you pray to your God, the Almighty, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, whom you have never been closer to than at this moment, for this is how He reveals himself to us now, in his purest and most beautiful form: a blazing train in the forest.

…Jackson muttered to me, ‘Bedlam.’ I was beginning to understand his compulsion to solve puzzles. Every few feet, a new mystery taunted me. An eighteen wheeler lay atop a house. On my right, someone had painstakingly nailed a wedding dress and veil to a front door. A dingy sleeve waved in the wind. To my left, a dead man and young boy were positioned in a front yard, as if they’d been making snow angels in the ash right up to the end. On the side of a dumpster, someone had spray-painted: Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn…Whatever.

He reached out and touched my lower lip, barely brushing the edge. “It starts out the same, but then, after a moment,” he said, speaking softly, “suddenly it’s as though I’ve a living flame in my arms.” His touch grew firmer, outlining my lips and caressing the line of my jaw. “And I want only to throw myself into it and be consumed.” I thought of telling him that his own touch seared my skin and filled my veins with fire. But I was already alight and glowing like a brand. I closed my eyes and felt the kindling touch move to cheek and temple, ear and neck, and shuddered as his hands dropped to my waist and drew me close.

inherit

When the day shall come, that we do part,” he said softly, and turned to look at me, “if my last words are not ‘I love you’—ye’ll ken it was because I didna have time.” This book is for my Sister, Theresa Gabaldon,

I wept in the snow and crumbled to ash for I was only pages in a book, burned and lost and gone forever.

would likely dismiss him without a character.” “One of the servants is bound to find her,” I said, returning to an earlier worry in order to avoid thinking about this latest manifestation of tragedy. “No, they won’t. They’ll all be busy serving. And by the morning, she may be recovered enough to go back to her uncle’s house. I sent round a note,” he added, “to tell them she was staying the night with a friend, as it was late. Didna want them searching for her.” “Yes, but—” “Sassenach.” His hands on my shoulders stopped me, and he peered over my shoulder to meet my eyes in the mirror. “We canna let her be seen by anyone, until she’s able to speak and to act as usual. Let it be known what’s happened to her, and her reputation will be ruined entirely.” “Her reputation! It’s hardly her fault she

But beyond that consideration … it drew the men together. You would not think that such men—Highlanders, crofters—that they would find themselves in particular sympathy with … such situations, such persons.” He waved his free hand at the book, indicating such persons as Squire Allworthy and Lady Bellaston, I supposed. “But they would talk it over for hours—whilst we labored the next day, they would wonder why Ensign Northerton had done as he had with regard to Miss Western, and argue whether they themselves would or would not have behaved so.” His face lightened a little, recalling something. “And invariably, a man would shake his head and say, ‘At least I’ve never been treated in that manner!’ He might be starved, cold, covered in sores, permanently separated from his family and customary circumstances—and yet he could take comfort in never having suffered such vicissitudes as had befallen these imaginary beings!

yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.” “Hmm.” I thought about that for a bit. “You’re right; that’s less poetic, but a bit more … hopeful?” I felt him smile. “I’ve always found it so, aye.” “Where did you get that?” “John Grey lent me a wee book of Donne’s writing, when I was prisoner at Helwater. That was in it.” “A very literate gentleman,” I said, somewhat piqued at this reminder of the substantial chunk of Jamie’s life that John Grey had shared and I had not—but grudgingly glad that he had had a friend through that time of trial.

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION: More than twenty-five years ago while researching the fourth Saint-Germain book, Path of the Eclipse, I ran across references to the Year of the Yellow Snow, sometimes called the Year of the Dark Sun, in Western reckoning A.D. 535-36, which was characterized by catastrophic drops in temperature, crop failures, and famine throughout Asia and Europe, with disruption of trade and movements of populations resulting from these losses—just the sort of event to set the speculative juices, flowing, but not the object of my research, nor the period with which I was dealing, promising though it appeared. Then, about ten years ago, other researchers did some serious scholarship on those disastrous events and tried to determine the cause of what turned out to be a worldwide famine and, after considering a number of different scenarios from meteor collisions to a mini-ice age—which indeed occurred—at last identified the probable source of the trouble as an eruption of that all-time bad-boy volcano, Krakatoa; this eruption was more overwhelming than many of its others, for, according to records in Indonesia, this eruption broke Sumatra off from Java—Krakatoa is at the hinge position of those two islands—and opened the Sundra Strait to a deep-water sea passage instead of only the shallowest-draft boats, which it had been for centuries. The eruption occurred in late February or early March of A.D. 535, and its explosion was heard all the way to Beijing. It had been heralded by many months of regional instability, earthquakes, and drastic variations in ocean temperatures in and around what was becoming the Sundra Strait, making the shipping lanes more treacherous than they had been in the past. Many ships' captains reported dangerous sailing in and around Indonesia, and over time, merchant ships avoided the region. ¶ In April, following the eruption, the ash from the volcano had spread all around the world, and disaster followed after it, impacting global weather patterns and lowering the average temperatures sufficiently to keep crops from growing in most of Asia and Europe, as well as large portions of Africa and Americas. Although every part of the world was affected, there were regions that bore more of the brunt of the tragedy than others. Many of the nomadic people of the Central Asian Steppes were driven out of their traditional grazing lands when their herds began to die because of lack of food as the grasslands became arid plains, and their struggle to find new pastureland was made much more difficult by the impact of the colder weather; the significant westward migration from Central Asia began as an attempt to find grass for their herds. In China and Tibet, the snow that continued to fall all the way into June and July was yellow due to the high levels of sulfur in the upper atmosphere. Closer to the eruption site, actual flakes of sulfur fell from the sky, burning people, animals, and fields alike and contaminating wells, springs, and rivers; the devastation of the Indonesian Islands was calamitous, with tens of thousands of people killed in tsunamis spawned by the eruption, by gaseous emanations, and by sulfur contamination, records of which still exist in the royal archives of the Srivijava Empire, which comprised most of modern Indonesia. For months afterward, the remains of humans, animals, trees, sea-life, and buildings washed up on the shores of what are now Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines, China, and India.