“In that vast cemetery where the odor of death was already attracting vultures from far away, and where the weeping of orphans and wails of the injured filled the air, the little girl obstinately clinging to life became the symbol of the tragedy.”

Azucena first appears not as a character accompanied by a name or other distinguishing details, but as a symbol. The terms “approach” and “fill” connote encroaching movement—a sense that death is trespassing on territory that does not, or should not, belong to it. Azucena, in her “obstinate” half-suspended state, holds firm as one of the few life forms death cannot yet move in on. The terms “odor” and “air” signify the disembodied presence of the doom that threatens the village’s inhabitants, heightening their fears and anxieties, but it also ironically evokes the incorporeality that some religions believe brings peace and an end to suffering after death.

“For some time [the geologists] had predicted that the heat of the eruption could detach the eternal ice from the slopes of the volcano, but no one heeded their warnings; they sounded like the tales of frightened old women.” 

This passage establishes nature as the one thing that may dislocate or significantly alter itself, as it is not human activity but the “heat of the eruption” that detaches the supposedly “eternal” ice from the volcano slopes. Humans are not only significantly weaker than the natural forces that govern the world around them, but they are also only brief collateral damage in a much grander drama taking place among the forces of nature themselves. Additionally, this piece likens these experts, whom one might expect to have a favorable social position and credibility, to “frightened old women”—a demographic likely to experience condescension as the result of both their age and their gender.