‘That very afternoon I made inquiries from all my friends in the town about the disturbance, and what do you think I found? One thing I found out was, that it had just gone through the town in a straight line. It had worked just like the subtle fluid works; it had travelled along the shortest distance between two points. It hadn’t gone to the right or the left, but it had gone as electricity goes, in a straight line, and therefore I say that earthquakes are electricity. And what is more, when we get some railroads through the country, the stuff will gradually escape along the metals, and these underground thunderstorms, as I call ’em, will stop. Now what do you think of that for a theory?’ said he.
He finished up by telling me the following story about Soft Sammy.
‘In many countries when an earthquake takes place,’ he began, ‘the land goes down. At Lisbon it went down so suddenly that it buried a whole lot of people. In our country, so far as I can make out, the land appears to have a habit of going up. In ’55 about 4,600 square miles of land rose in some places nine feet, and the breadth of the beach increased more than 100 feet.
‘All this, you know, occurred near Wellington, and it has kept on occurring, off and on, ever since. The trouble and litigation these earth-jerks have cost us have been something terrible.
‘After the first jump-up, people were for a time too scared to know what they ought to do. Most of them, when they recovered a bit, began to scratch about amongst their ruins, trying to root out their property. Most of the things had got so flattened that it was difficult to tell what was yours and what was somebody else’s.
‘One man sued another for having been digging in the wrong ruins. The plaintiff deposed that the defendant had not only trespassed, but had stolen his kitchen-clock. The article was produced in court, and the defence held it not to be a clock, but a warming-pan.
‘If it was a clock, the judge remarked that he should give the case in favour of the plaintiff; but if it was a warming-pan, he should be compelled to side with the defendant.
‘Do you know, the thing had been so flattened, that there wasn’t a jury in Wellington could decide whether the thing was a clock or a warming-pan. One man stuck to it that it was a frying-pan, and from the smell of it should say it had last been used to cook beefsteak and onions.
‘While all this was going on in the town, the people who lived along the quay were speculating as to when the water was coming back. There were all the ships lying high and dry, and, as far as you could see, there was a broad beach covered with rocks and seaweed. It wasn’t so many days before the mussels and stuff began to putrefy, and when the breeze set in from outside, the smell was horrible.