The public papers have told us how, in less than a quarter of an hour, nearly all who were in that fatal church—that stupendous holocaust—to the number of nearly 3,000, perished; how a phalanx of death choked up the porch, and how, in many instances, tender hands and delicate arms were wrenched, yea, literally torn off, in attempts to drag forth the dying; how whole families were reduced to cinders, side by side, and all in the lapse of a few minutes.
They also told us "how the voice of lamentation was heard all over the land, and the bitter weeping of fathers, of husbands, and lovers for those who were the joy and brightness of their life, that refuses to be comforted because they are not. Hundreds of young girls, only yesterday radiant and beautiful, in the luxuriant bloom of the fresh and hopeful spring of life, to-day calcined, hideous corpses, horrible, loathsome to the sight, and impossible to be recognised! Within that quarter of an hour 2,000 souls had passed through the ordeal of fire to the judgment-seat of God!"
Old Don Salvador de Moreno made frenzied efforts to pierce through the pile of maddened and suffocating women, who hopelessly blocked up the door of the church, seeking to see, to save if he could, his daughter—his only child.
The screaming, the wringing of hands, the tearing of hair, and beating of faces, the invocations of the dying, and the roar of the advancing flames within and beyond, imparting to the church portal an appearance like to the entrance of a vast furnace, seared his heart and his eyeballs.
He saw not his daughter; but, amid this most unearthly blaze, he could distinguish Donna Erminia, and knew that Ignez could not be far off. He could see the tall, fair-skinned, proud, and beautiful Erminia, and little Paula, with her hair dishevelled, like many others near her, undergo a sudden and horrible transformation, as the lurid flame seized upon their skirts and tresses.
The sheet of scorching fire passed over them!
They became blackened, lean, shrunken, rigid, dead, sable statues, in contorted attitudes, and then crumbled away amid the furnace, for such had the church become.
Suddenly a figure rose for an instant amid the mass. It was Perez—Perez with Ignez in his arms, and as he rose her father saw them—his hair and her dress all ablaze; then both sank back into that red sea of fire, to rise no more!
The old man became senseless, and was borne out of the press by the alguazil-mayor and Cramply Hawkshaw.
The Chilian papers tell us that a horseman threw his lasso into the church where a hundred hands tried to catch it. This man was Felipe Fernandez, of Valparaiso, who by main strength dragged one woman out in flames.