Stay focused and get the hell out of here, I told myself firmly as I felt my knees weaken at the sight. I reached blindly for the solidity of the rock beside me, numbly gazing at the cooling lava, blackening over the torn, exposed earth.  Fallen, broken, matchstick trees lay scattered and jumbled for as far as the eye could see, far outnumbering the forlorn trees that were left standing here and there—like a few remaining soldiers wading through fields of the dead. Lakes, whose locations I knew intimately, were simply gone, in some cases replaced by new protuberances of exposed rock. There were some new lakes—large, silty and debris-laden—that occupied areas which were never before under water. And surrounding everything was the eerie stillness, like I was the last living thing around for miles…