The further the ruins are explored the greater becomes the increase in the list of those who perished as their houses fell about their heads. On the lower beach a searching party found a score of corpses within a small area, going to show that the bulwark of debris that lies straight across the island conceals many more bodies than have been accounted for.
Volunteer gangs continue their work of hurried burial of the corpses they find on the shores of Galveston Island at the many neighboring points where fatalities attended the storm. It will probably be many days yet, however, before all the floating bodies have found nameless graves.
MANGLED CORPSES WASHED ASHORE.
Along the beach they are constantly being washed up. Whether these are those who were swept out into the Gulf and drowned or are simply the return of some of those cast into the sea to guard against terrible pestilence, there is no means of knowing. In any event, the correspondent, in a trip across the bay yesterday, counted seven bodies tossing in the waves with a score of horses and cattle.
The city still presents the appearance of widespread wreck and ruin. Little has been done to clear the streets of the terrible tangle of wires and the masses of wreck, mortar, slate, stone and glass that bestrew them. Many of the sidewalks are impassable. Some of them are littered with debris. Others are so thickly covered with slime that walking on them is out of the question.
As a general rule, substantial frame buildings withstood better the blasts of the gale than those of brick. In other instances, however, small wooden structures, cisterns and whole sides of houses are lying in streets or backyards squares away from where they originally stood.
Here and there business men have already put men to work to repair the damage done, but in the main the commercial interests seem to be uncertain about following the lead of those who apparently show faith in the rapid rehabilitation of the island city. The appearance of the newspapers to-day, after a suspension of several days, is having a good effect, and both the News and Tribune are urging prompt succoring of the suffering and then equal promptness in reconstruction.
It is difficult to say yet what the ultimate effect of the disaster is to be on the city. Many people have left and some may never return. The experience of others still here was so frightful that not all will remain if they can conveniently find occupation in other cities.
WONDERFUL COURAGE AND HOPE.
The bulk of the population, however, is only temporarily panic stricken, and there are hosts of those who helped to make Galveston great who look upon the catastrophe as involving only a temporary halt in the advancement of the city.