Charles Morris

“ But deep down in the earth the gases and pent-up steam, are ever preparing to force their way upward through the mountain, and to carry with them dissolved rocks, and the stones which block their passage. Sometimes, while all is calm and beautiful on the mountains, suddenly deep-sounding noises are heard, the ground shakes, and a vast torrent tears its way through the bowels of the volcano, and is flung hundreds of feet high in the air, and, falling again to the earth, destroys every living thing for miles around. ”

“ We caught a train for Torre Annunziata, three miles this side of Pompeii and two miles from the southern end of the wedge of lava which destroyed Bosco Trecase. We had a magnificent view of the eruption, eight miles away. Rising at an angle of fifty degrees, the vast mass of tumult roundness was beautifully accentuated by the full moon, shifting momentarily into new forms and drifting south in low, black clouds of ashes and cinders reaching to Capri. At Torre del Greco we ran under this terrifying pall, apparently a hundred feet above, the solidity of which was soon revealed in the moonlight. ”

“ It was with grief and horror that the mass of the people gazed on this steady march of the army of ruin. They were seemingly half dazed by the magnitude of the disaster, strangely passive in the face of the ruin that surrounded them, as if stunned by despair and not yet awakened to a realization of the horrors of the situation. Among these was the possibility of famine. No city at any time carries more than a few days’ supply of provisions, and with the wholesale districts and warehouse regions invaded by the flames the shortage of food made itself apparent from the start. ”

“ In a few days we may be called to announce the painful fact that our beauteous Hilo is no more,—that our lovely, our inimitable landscape, our emerald bowers, our crescent strand and our silver bay are blotted out. A fiery sword hangs over us. A flood of burning ruin approaches us. Devouring fires are near us. With sure and solemn progress the glowing fusion advances through the dark forest and the dense jungle in our rear, cutting down ancient trees of enormous growth and sweeping away all vegetable life. For months the great summit furnace on Mauna Loa has been in awful blast. ”

“ Again and again the trembling of the earth passed by, three quickly repeated shocks, and the work of the demon of ruin was done. People woke with a start to find themselves flung from their beds to the floor, many of them covered with the fragments of broken ceilings, many lost among the ruins of falling floors and walls, many pinned in agonizing suffering under the ruins of their houses, which had been utterly wrecked in those fatal seconds. Many there were, indeed, who had been flung to quick if not to instant death under their ruined homes. ”

“ Another part of the gay life of the city was for a private dance to keep going all night in a fashionable residence, and at daylight, instead of everybody going to bed, to jump into automobiles or carriages or take the trolley cars and whizz off to the beach for a dip in the cold salt water pool at Sutro’s baths, and then, with ravenous appetites, sit down on the Cliff House balcony to an open-air breakfast while watching the ships sail in and out at the Golden Gate and hearing the seals barking on the rocks. ”

“ Fancy a rich and thickly populated country of vineyards lying under three to six inches of ashes and cinders of the color of chocolate with milk, while above, to the west, the volcano in full activity is distributing to the outer edges of the circle the same fate, and you will get an idea of the desolate impression of the scene, a tragedy colossal and heartrending. Like that of Calabria, it enlists the sympathy of the civilized world. It takes time for such a calamity to be realized. ”

“ Does its rock crust resemble the thick ice crust on the Arctic Seas, or is the earth, as later scientists believe, solid to the core? Is it heated so fiercely, miles below our feet, that at every release of pressure the solid rock bursts into molten lava? Is the steam from the contact of underground rivers and deep-lying fires the origin of the terrible rending powers of the volcano’s depths? ”

“ The new San Francisco will be a cleaner, saner and safer city, destitute of its rookeries, its tenements and its Chinatown. It will be a greater and more sightly city than that of the past, but to those who knew and loved the old San Francisco—San Francisco the captivating, the maddest, gayest, liveliest and most rollicking in the country—there must be something impressibly sad to its old inhabitants in the reflection that the new city of the Golden Gate can never be quite the same as the haven of their early affections. ”

“ It is the most unutterable of wonderful things. The words of common speech are quite useless. It is unimaginable, indescribable; a sight to remember forever; a sight which at once took possession of every faculty of sense and soul, removing one altogether out of the range of ordinary life. Here was the real ‘bottomless pit’, ‘the fire which is not quenched’, ‘the place of Hell’, ‘the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone’, ‘the everlasting burnings’, ‘the fiery sea whose waves are never weary’. ”

“ Shortly after three o’clock in the morning the explosive energy of the mighty mass culminated. The whole cone burst open with a tremendous earthquake shock, from the heart of the recently silent mountain came a deafening roar, and red-hot rocks, like the balls from nature’s mighty artillery, were hurled a half mile into the air, while a dense mass of ashes and sand was flung to three or four times this height. All the next day the terrible detonation kept up, and a hail of bullet-like stones poured downward from the skies. Rarely has a more terrible Sunday been seen. ”

“ The scene that was visible in the streets of San Francisco on that dread Wednesday morning was one to make the strongest shudder with horror. Those three minutes of devastating earth tremors were moments never to be forgotten. In such a time it is the human instinct to get into the open air, and the people stumbled from their heaving and quivering houses to find even the solid earth was swaying and rising and falling, so that here and there great rents opened in the streets. To the panic-stricken people the minutes that followed seemed years of terror. ”

“ If we pass now from the record of the loss of lives to that of the destruction of wealth, the estimates exceed by far any fire losses recorded in history.
The truth is that when flames eat out the heart of a great city, devour its vast business establishments, storehouses and warehouses, sweep through its centres of opulence, destroy its wharves with their accumulation of goods, spread ruin and havoc everywhere, it is impossible at first to estimate the loss. ”

“ San Francisco’s famous Chinatown, the greatest settlement of the Celestials on this continent, went down like a house of cards. When the earthquake had passed this den of squalor and infamy was no more. The Chinese theatres and joss-houses tumbled into ruins, rookery after rookery collapsed, and hundreds of their inhabitants were buried alive. Panic reigned supreme among the fugitives, who filled the streets in frightened multitudes, dragging from the wreck whatever they could save of their treasured possessions. ”

“ Fortunately for humanity, this new trade-wind does not come within less than twenty miles of the earth’s surface. We are thus preserved from the fearful destruction that its unintermittent blasts would produce, blasts against which no tree could stand and which would, in ten minutes, do as much damage to a city as would the most violent earthquake. When this great wind had become charged with the dust of Krakatoa, then, for the first, and, I may add, for the only time, it stood revealed to human vision. ”

“ No one who has ever seen a volcano or “burning mountain” casting forth steam, huge red-hot stones, smoke, cinders and lava, can possibly forget the grandeur of the spectacle. At night it is doubly terrible, when the darkness shows the red-hot lava rolling in glowing streams down the mountain’s side. At times, indeed, the volcano is quiet, and only a little smoke curls from its top. Even this may cease, and the once burning summit may be covered over with trees and grass, like any other hill. ”

“ FIRE ATTACKS THE MINT.
To return to the story of the conflagration, the escape of the United States Mint was one of the most remarkable incidents. Within the vaults of this fine structure was the vast sum of $300,000,000 in gold and silver coin and a value of $8,000,000 in bullion, and toward this mighty sum of wealth the flames swept on all sides, as if eager to add the reservoir of the precious metals to their spoils. The Mint building passed through the earthquake with little damage, though its big smokestacks were badly shaken. ”

“ The terrors of the earthquake are momentary. One fierce, levelling shock and usually all is over. The torment within the earth has passed on and the awakened forces of the earth’s crust sink into rest again, after having shaken the surface for many leagues. Rarely does the dread agent of ruin leave behind it such a terrible follower to complete its work as was the case in the doomed city of San Francisco. ”

“ The shock of the earthquake, the pulse of deep horror to which it gave rise, the first wild impulse to flee for life, gave way in the minds of many to a feeling of intense sympathy as agonized cries came from those pinned down to the ruins of buildings or felled by falling bricks or stones, and as the sight of dead bodies incrimsoned with blood met the eyes of the survivors in the streets. ”

“ They were forced helplessly and hopelessly to gaze upon the destruction of their all, and it is no marvel if many of them grew frantic and lost their reason at the sight. Thousands gathered and looked on in blank and pitiful misery, their strong hands, their iron wills of no avail, while the red-lipped fire devoured the hopes of their lives.
In a dozen, a hundred, places the flames shot up redly. Huge, strong buildings which the earthquake had spared fell an unresisting prey to the flames. ”

“ Those able to move stumbled in wild panic across the floors of their heaving houses, regardless of clothing, of treasures, of everything but the mad instinct for safety, and rushed headlong into the streets, to find that the earth itself had yielded to the energy of its frightful interior forces and had in places been torn and rent like the houses themselves. New terrors assailed the fugitives as fresh tremors shook the solid ground, some of them strong enough to bring down shattered walls and chimneys, and bring back much of the mad terror of the first fearful quake. ”

“ Sitting, like Rome of old, on its seven hills, San Francisco has long been noted for its beautiful site, clasped in, as it is, between the Pacific Ocean and its own splendid bay, on a peninsula of some five miles in width. Where this juts into the bay at its northernmost point rises a great promontory known as Telegraph Hill, from whose height homeless thousands have recently gazed on the smoke rising from their ruined homes. ”

“ It may seem strange that so dangerous a neighborhood should be inhabited. But so it is. Though Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae lie buried beneath the mud and ashes belched out of the mouth of Vesuvius, the villages of Portici and Revina, Torre del Greco and Torre del Annunziata have taken their place, and a large population, cheerful and prosperous, flourishes around the disturbed mountain and over the district of which it is the somewhat untrustworthy safety-valve. ”

“ At midnight the fire was raging and roaring with unslacked rage, and at dawn of Thursday its fury was undiminished. The work of destruction was already immense. In much of the Hayes Valley district, south of McAllister and north of Market Street, the destruction was complete. From the Mechanics’ Pavilion and St. Nicholas Hotel opposite down to Oakland Ferry the journey was heartrending, the scene appalling. On each side was ruin, nothing but ruin, and hillocks of masonry and heaps of rubbish of every description filled to its middle the city’s greatest thoroughfare. ”

“ The course of rivers is changed and the waters are swallowed up by fissures rent in the surface, while ruin impends in a thousand forms. The cities become death pits and the cultivated fields are buried beneath floods of liquid mud. Fortunately these convulsions, alike of the earthquake and volcano, are comparative rarities and are confined to limited regions of the earth’s surface. What do we know of those deep-lying powers, those vast buried forces dwelling in uneasy isolation beneath our feet? ”

“ The sun may pour down burning rays for weeks and months together, scorching the fertile fields, drying up the life-giving streams, bringing famine and misery to lands of plenty and comfort, almost making the blood to boil in our veins. Its antithesis, the rainstorm, is at times a still more terrible visitant. From the dense clouds pour frightful floods, rushing down the lofty hills, sweeping over fertile plains, overflowing broad river valleys, and, wherever they go, leaving terror and death in their path. We may say the same of the alternation of the seasons. ”

“ The spectacle of the entire population of a great city thus roused suddenly from slumber by a fierce earthquake shock and sent flying into the streets in utter panic, where not buried under falling walls or tumbling debris, is one that can scarcely be pictured in words, and can be given in any approach to exact realization only in the narratives of those who passed through its horrors and experienced the sensations to which it gave rise. ”

“ A million dollars’ worth of property, noble residences and worthless shacks alike, were blown to drifting dust, but that destruction broke the fire and sent the raging flames back over their own charred path. The whole east side of Van Ness Avenue, from the Golden Gate to Greenwich, a distance of twenty-two blocks, or a mile and a half, was dynamited a block deep, though most of the structures as yet had stood untouched by spark or cinder. Not one charge failed. Not one building stood upon its foundation. ”

“ Suddenly the solid earth begins to tremble and quake; roars as of one of the buried giants of old strike all men with dread; then, with a fierce convulsion, a mountain is rent in twain and vast torrents of steam, burning rock, and blinding dust are hurled far upward into the air, to fall again and bury cities, perhaps, with all their inhabitants in indiscriminate ruin and death. ”

“ Nothing can be more majestic than this volcano, extinct though it be, rising in an immense cone from the plain to the height of over twelve thousand feet, truncated at the top, and with its peak almost always snow-covered. Its ascent is not difficult to an expert climber, and has frequently been made. From its summit is unfolded a panorama beyond the power of words to describe, and probably the most remarkable on the globe. ”

“ When the news came to the camps of refugees that it was safe to cross the burned area a procession began from the Golden Gate Park across the city and down Market Street, the thoroughfare which had long been the pride of the citizens, and a second from the Presidio, along the curving shore line of the north bay, thence southward along the water front. Throughout these routes, eight miles long, a continuous flow of humanity dragged its weary way all day and far into the night amidst hundreds of vehicles, from the clumsy garbage cart to the modern automobile. ”

“ San Francisco was not merely land and the buildings erected upon it, but it was people, and one of the most active, most hopeful, most vivacious human communities on the face of the earth. You cannot long discourage such a community, unless you wipe out three-fourths of its members. Will San Francisco rise again? Most certainly it will. Galveston and Baltimore, not to mention Charleston, Boston and Chicago, showed the spirit of material resurrection in American communities, sore-smitten by calamity. ”