There was no one at the guard station that flanked the entrance to the emir's gardens, a weekend retreat for Kuwait's ruling family. It would have been cruel to station a man there. Fire-fighting teams had not yet reached the large walled compound—they were working far to the north—and the fires burning on all sides kept the area shrouded in heavy smoke no matter which way the wind was blowing. It was, at ten o'clock on a desert morning, dark as dusk, and the temperature under the smoke stood at 80 degrees. It was 105 in the sun.

We drove through a shallow pond of oil at the entrance and onto a circular driveway fronting a modest group of buildings. There was a children's play area nearby: teeter-totters and monkey bars coated in oil. On the ground were the oily remnants of a cow that had been slaughtered, presumably for food, by occupying Iraqi troops. There were other black cowlike shapes on the ground, interspersed with the corpses of several large birds, presumably from the compound's aviary. The largest and highest plume of flame I saw in Kuwait—I estimated its height at 200 feet­—boomed and thundered just beyond the north wall.

This fire was a smoker, and it had formed a lake that abutted the eight-foot-high wall. Where there were breaks in the blackened cinder blocks, tongues of oil seeped into a low-lying palm orchard. These small rivers were burning and running down irrigation ditches, where they lapped at the tree trunks.

My boots were caked with a black, sandy muck so that I walked in a clumping, stiff-legged manner, like Frankenstein's monster. Visibility was limited to about 15 feet, though I could see, through the falling soot, the large fire and half a dozen others leaping above the north wall. I moved toward them, careful to avoid stepping on the nubbly tracks of coke, a rocky, coallike by-product of the burning oil. In some places the coke was several feet deep, but it was also possible that the coke could be mere scum over a burning stream below. Crack the coke, I thought, and the entire track could reignite.

Presently I saw a man-size break in the wall and moved toward it through the swirling, granular darkness. The inferno beyond lit the break with a shifting, red-orange light, and I could feel the heat on my face like a bad sunburn. Everything that wasn't burning was black: the earth, the familiar shapes of the trees, the animal carcasses that littered the place. This was ground zero for the largest man-made environmental disaster in history. It was a perfect vision of hell.

I moved through the break in the wall and stopped. The next step would put me in the burning lake, which was throwing up the thickest, grainiest smoke I had yet encountered. It blinded me and made my eyes water. Despite the bandana I wore over my nose and mouth I found myself choking, and then I was coughing in fits that bent me over at the waist.

It was a sudden misery, and yet something that lives in my soul—some compelling, god-awful urge—found this horror grotesquely enthralling. It is the same urge, I think, that drives us to observe the destructive effects of a hurricane or tornado, an avalanche or flood. We shudder deliciously in the face of incomprehensible forces, in the wake of events that insurance companies call "acts of God."

But this was an act of Man, which made it a palpable evil: madness made visible in flame.

I fled back into the black gardens, clumping over the burning trenches, coughing uncontrollably as tears streamed from my eyes.