The stunning shock, like a succession of startled heart-beats, lasted twelve seconds less than one minute, but those who experienced the ordeal say it seemed an eternity—forty-eight seconds—terrible seconds—of sickening, swaying suspense. A heaving earth, jerking, pulsing to and fro in mad frenzy, while countless buildings were swaying and keeping time to a wild hissing noise like the noise of boiling, blubbering fat in a rendering caldron.
It was the dawn of a new day abounding in hideous noises—detonations of falling masonry, the crash of crumbling, crushing walls, the shrieks of maimed and helpless victims—and all the people stupefied with a terrible fear, women weeping in hysterical fright and everyone expectant of they knew not what, unable to think coherently or reason, yet their voices filling the stricken city with cries and moans of heart-rending terror and lamentation. And all the while there came up from somewhere an unearthly threatening roar that awed the multitude into unnatural submissive bewilderment.
At the end of eight and forty seconds the frantically tossed earth quieted—became normal and was still. Some of the buildings righted and were quiescent, and a moment of silence followed, except for the crowing of cocks, the whinnying of frightened horses and the whining of cowering dogs. This condition, however, was only of momentary duration.
Almost immediately the streets became a wild scene of turmoil as the half-clothed, half-crazed men, women and children went rushing up and down in every direction, they knew not why nor where. Doors were broken open to allow egress, shutters were slammed, windows were hastily raised, and like a myriad of ants the rest of the people who until now had been penned up, struggled forth into open ways—thinly clad, some almost naked, trembling, gazing about awe-stricken, looking each at his fellow, indifferent to the destruction going on about them, each filled with prayerful thankfulness for life. Then, like a rehearsed orchestra of many voices, there arose, seemingly in unison, a chorus of heart-piercing wails and calls from thousands of throats for loved ernes—loved ones lost who could not answer.
In the pale light of that April dawn, this vast army of survivors, while chilled with outward cold, shivered also with an unspeakable inward dread.
Along the streets of proud San Francisco in every direction were huge masses of bricks, cornices, fallen ragged chimneys and walls, tumbled together in complex dykes of débris like the winrows of a hay field and interspersed with the dead and dying bodies of man and horse alike, vanquished in life’s uneven contest.
A little later in the vicinity of the ten-million-dollar courthouse, crowds of frightened people gathered, attracted perhaps by the terrific thundering of the mammoth stone slabs and concrete sides and columns of the structure, as, in their loosened condition from the steel skeleton, they kept crashing down upon the street in riotous disorder.
Every block in the city held its tragedy, its silent evidence of a mighty internal upheaving of Goliath strength. There were hundreds of dead, while others lay maimed in tortured suffering, buried under wreckage, pinned down by the giant hands of the Angel of Destruction. The unfortunates still living were fastened like insects caught in traps, helpless, but hoping for relief, awaiting the unwritten chapter that was yet to come.
The great earthquake of San Francisco had spent its force—its rude results lay in careless disheveled evidence on every hand—and now the nerve-strained, half-crazed and bewildered people caught the sound of fire bells clanging hurriedly into nearer distances.
The fire hose and the corps of hook and ladder men came rushing with all speed, drawn by frenzied horses, hastily turning street corners and dashing around fallen walls while the automatic fire bells were cutting the air in metallic, staccato beats of wildest alarm. Soon the throbbing of the fire engines began and false hope sprung rife in the hearts of the people. Those running south on Market Street paused in bewilderment, not knowing which way to go, for fire calls and flames were evident, not in one location nor two, but in hundreds at widely separated places throughout the erstwhile magnificent metropolis of the Occident.