When the center of the dam yielded at three o’clock, it did so in a break of 300 feet wide. Trees and rocks were hurled high in the air, and the vast, boiling flood rushed down the ravine like an arrow from a bow. It took one hour to empty the reservoir. In less than five minutes the flood reached South Fork, and thence, changing the direction of its rush, swept through the valley of the Conemaugh. With the procession of the deluge, trees, logs, debris of buildings, rocks, railroad iron, and the indescribable mass of drift were more and more compacted for battering power; and what the advance bore of the flood spared, the mass in the rear, made up of countless battering rams, destroyed.
The distance from Conemaugh lake to Johnstown, something over, eighteen miles, was traversed in about seven minutes; and here the loss of life and the damage to property was simply appalling. Survivors who passed through the experience safely declare its horrors to have been far beyond the power of words to narrate. After the most thorough possible
CHAPTER XXXIV.
ST. PIERRE, MARTINIQUE, ANNIHILATED BY A VOLCANO.
BY TRUMBULL WHITE.
Fifty Thousand Men, Women and Children Slain in an Instant—The Island Capital Obliterated—Molten Fire and Suffocating Gases Rob Multitudes of Life—Death Reigns in the Streets of the Stricken City—The Governor and Foreign Consuls Die at their Posts of Duty—Burst of Flame from Mount Pelee Completes the Ruin—No Escape for the Hapless Residents in the Fated Town—Scenes of Suffering Described—St. Pierre the Pompeii of Today—Desolation over All—Few Left to Tell the Tale of the Morning of Disaster.
BEHOLD a peaceful city in the Caribbean sea, beautiful with the luxuriant vegetation of a tropic isle, happy as the carefree dwellers in such a spot may well be, at ease with the comforts of climate and the natural products which make severe labor unnecessary in these sea-girt colonies. Rising from the water front to the hillsides that lead back toward the slopes of Mount Pelee, St. Pierre, metropolis of the French island of Martinique, sits in picturesque languor, the blue waves of the Caribbean murmuring on the beaches, the verdure-clad ridges of the mountain range forming a background of greenery for the charming picture. Palms shade the narrow, clean, white, paved streets; trade goes on at the wharves; the people visit in social gaiety, dressed in white or bright-colored garments, as is the fashion in these islands, where somberness seldom rules; all the forms of life are cheerful, light-hearted, even thoughtless.
Suddenly a thrall of black despair is cast over the happy island. The city of pleasure becomes one great tomb. Of its 30,000 men, women and children, all but a few are slain. The Angel of Death has spread his pall over them, a fiery breath has smitten them, and they have fallen as dry stubble before the sweep of flame. A city is dead. An island is desolate. A world is grief-stricken.