A Child of the Orient

by Demetra Vaka

My little eight year old cousin raised her head from her bed and stared at me across the room.

“Alkmeny!” I said crossly, “don’t shake your bed, child. It shakes the room most unpleasantly.”

“I thought it was you shaking the room,” the child replied.

Then it occurred to me that it would take a giant to shake the huge room. It was the second story of a rock house, with two foot thick walls.

The room shook again, so violently that I bit the end of my tongue, and for the moment thought of nothing except the pain of it. Then it grew dark, like dusk, and there was a noise as if hundreds of baskets of walnuts were being poured down the staircase. In the thick stone walls cracks a foot wide appeared; the edges trembled, as if uncertain whether to fall inside or out, and with a crash came together again.

The children were thrown out of their beds, and I gazed at them passively. At this instant did some past incarnation of mine say the word “earthquake!” or was the word really called by some one outside? All I know is that “seismos!” rang in my ears, and with it everything I had ever heard about earthquakes flashed into my mind. “Don’t walk—crawl!” was the first thing, and obeying it I dropped to the floor, caught up the youngest child in my arms, and told the other two to cling to my gown. Then in a sitting position I worked my way out of the room and down the stairs.

The floor was waving up and down, but we managed to get down the short flight of steps. The noise meanwhile was deafening, and the darkness in the house complete. When we reached the front door and were about to go out, one of the maids pushed me violently aside and dashed out herself. A part of the falling chimney struck her on the head, and she fell to the ground, quite dead. I climbed over her body, still crawling, with the child in my arms. My white négligé was covered with the maid’s blood, but this did not affect me at the time in the least. I crawled on and on, while the terrific noises and the shaking continued, always remembering that the safest place was the middle of the lawn—as far from the house as possible. The children were holding tightly to my dressing-gown, and they, too, were covered with the dead woman’s blood.

As we were scuttling along the ground, little four year old Chrysoula cried out: “Cousin, my foot is caught!” One of the cracks in the earth—which was opening and shutting—had her little foot imprisoned; but in a second it opened again and her foot was free.

Fortunately, the house was surrounded by a large open lawn, otherwise we might have been killed by the falling trees. In the middle of the lawn we lay still, fascinated and bewildered. It was lighter out here in the open, so that we could see what was taking place. I was not consciously afraid. A kind of exaltation possessed me that I should be there to see the wonderful, ghastly spectacle.

The Turks say that during an earthquake devils with fiery eyes fly about the sky. And surely we saw them, only they must have been huge stones, hurled into the air, which clashed together, giving forth sparks that, for the fraction of a second, illumined their dark petrine bodies. One of those devils fell with a crash on the stable. It went through the roof, and in a few minutes the entire building was ablaze.