Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror

by Richard Linthicum; Samuel Fallows; Trumbull White

“Therefore the name of the city was called Zoar. The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.

“Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

“But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

“And Abraham got up early in the morning to the place where he stood before the Lord, and he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the city went up as the smoke of a furnace.”

Nothing could be more succinct or terse than this description of the catastrophe. This was a sudden volcanic eruption like that which destroyed in one night the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. At the time of the convulsion in Palestine while clouds of ashes were emitted from the yawning abyss and fell in fiery showers upon the ground, a vast tract of country, comprising the five cities and some land to the south of them, was violently shaken and overturned.

Of the valleys watered by the Jordan, that of Siddim was the largest and the most populous. All the southern part of this valley, with its woods, its cultivated fields, and its broad river, was upheaved. While upon the other side the plain subsided, and for a distance of a hundred leagues was transformed into a vast cavern of unknown depth. Upon that day the waters of the Jordan, suddenly arrested by the upheaval of the soil lower down the stream, must have flowed rapidly back toward their source, again to flow not less impetuously along their accustomed incline, and to fall into the abyss created by the subsidence of the valley and the break-up of the bed of the stream.

When, after the disaster, the inhabitants of neighboring regions came to visit the scene of it, they found the whole aspect of the district altered. The valley of Siddim had ceased to exist, and an immense sheet of water covered the space which it once occupied. Beyond this vast reservoir, to the south, the Jordan, which formerly fertilized the country as far as the Red Sea, had also disappeared. The whole country was covered with lava, ashes and salt; all the cultivated fields, the hamlets and villages, had been involved in the cataclysm.

The record of this great catastrophe is preserved not only by Scripture, but by the living and spoken traditions of the East, all the legends of Syria, as well as ancient historians like Tacitus and Strabo, relating how Lake Asphaltite was formed during the terrible shock and how opulent cities were swallowed up in the abyss or destroyed by fire from out of the earth.

But even if popular traditions had been forgotten, and if the writings of ancient authors had been lost, the very aspect of the country would suffice to show that it had suffered from some terrible subterranean convulsion. As it was upon the morrow of the catastrophe itself, so it has remained with its calcined rocks, its blocks of salt, its masses of black lava, its rough ravines, its sulphurous springs, its boiling waters, its bituminous marshes, its riven mountains, and its vast Lake Asphaltite, which is the Dead Sea.

This sea, the depth of which has never been sounded, evokes by its origin and its mysterious aspect, the dolorous image of death. Situated about 690 feet below the level of the ocean, in the depression of the soil caused by the earthquake, its waters extend over an area of a hundred square leagues to the foot of the salt mountains and basaltic rocks which encircle it. One can detect no trace of vegetation or animal life; not a sound is heard upon its shores, impregnated with salt and bitumen; the birds avoid flying over its dreary surface from which emanate deadly effluvia, and nothing can exist in its bitter, salt, oily, and heavy waters. Not a breeze ever stirs the surface of this silent sea, nothing moves therein save the thick load of asphalt which now and again rises from the bottom to the surface and floats lazily on to the desolate strand.