“I looked in a dazed fashion around me. I saw for an instant the big buildings in what looked like a crazy dance. Then it seemed as though my head were split with the roar that crashed into my ears. Big buildings were crumbling as one might crush a biscuit in one’s hand. Great gray clouds of dust shot up with flying timbers, and storms of masonry rained into the street. Wild, high jangles of smashing glass cut a sharp note into the frightful roaring. Ahead of me a great cornice crushed a man as if he were a maggot—a laborer in overalls on his way to the Union Iron Works, with a dinner pail on his arm.
“Everywhere men were on all fours in the street, like crawling bugs. Still the sickening, dreadful swaying of the earth continued. It seemed a quarter of an hour before it stopped. As a matter of fact, it lasted about three minutes. Footing grew firm again, but hardly were we on our feet before we were sent reeling again by repeated shocks, but they were milder. Clinging to something, one could stand.
“The dust clouds were gone. It was quite dark, like twilight. But I saw trolley tracks uprooted, twisted fantastically. I saw wide wounds in the street. Water flooded out of one. A deadly odor of gas from a broken main swept out of the other. Telegraph poles were rocked like matches. A wild tangle of wires was in the street. Some of the wires wriggled and shot blue sparks.
“From the south of us, faint, but all too clear, came a horrible chorus of human cries of agony. Down there in a ramshackle section of the city the wretched houses had fallen in upon the sleeping families. Down there throughout the day a fire burned the great part of whose fuel it is too gruesome a thing to contemplate.
“That was what came next—the fire. It shot up everywhere. The fierce wave of destruction had carried a flaming torch with it—agony, death and a flaming torch. It was just as if some fire demon was rushing from place to place with such a torch.”
WRECK AND RUIN.
The magnitude of the calamity became fully apparent after the sun had risen and began to shine warmly and brightly from the east over the ruined city. Old Sol, who had risen and looked down upon this city for thousands of times, had never before seen such a spectacle as that of this fateful morning. Where once rose noble buildings were now to be seen cracked and tottering walls, fallen chimneys, here and there fallen heaps of brick and mortar, and out of and above all the red light of the mounting flames. From the middle of the city’s greatest thoroughfare ruin, only ruin, was to be seen on all sides. To the south, in hundreds of blocks, hardly a building had escaped unscathed. The cracked walls of the new Post Office showed the rending power of the earthquake. A part of the splendid and costly City Hall collapsed, the roof falling to the courtyard and the smaller towers tumbling down. Some of the wharves, laden with goods of every sort, slid into the bay. With them went thousands of tons of coal. On the harbor front the earth sank from six to eight inches, and great cracks opened in the streets.
San Francisco’s famous Chinatown, the greatest settlement of the Celestials on this continent, went down like a house of cards. When the earthquake had passed this den of squalor and infamy was no more. The Chinese theatres and joss-houses tumbled into ruins, rookery after rookery collapsed, and hundreds of their inhabitants were buried alive. Panic reigned supreme among the fugitives, who filled the streets in frightened multitudes, dragging from the wreck whatever they could save of their treasured possessions. Much the same was the case with the Japanese quarter, which fire quickly invaded, the people fleeing in terror, carrying on their backs what few of their household effects they were able to rescue.
As for the people of Chinatown, however, no one knows or will ever know the extent of the dread fate that overcame them, for no one knows the secrets of that dark abode of infamy and crime, whose inhabitants burrowed underground like so many ants; and hid their secrets deep in the earth.
THE RUIN OF CHINATOWN.