Forbidden City

“ There is but one prison to a province, and that is sometimes empty. Our cities are all fire-proof, and the night air is never startled now by the hideous jangling of fire-bells, arousing the citizens from sleep to view the destruction of their city. ”

“ A Saharan desolation of blackened, ash covered, twisted debris was all that remained of three-fifths of the city that four days ago stood like a sentinel in glittering, jeweled armor, guarding the Golden Gate to the Pacific.
Men who had numbered their fortunes in the tens of thousands camped on the ruins of their homes, eating as primitive men ate—gnawing; thinking as primitive men thought. Ashes and the dull pain of despair were their portions. ”

“ The woman, no doubt, entices unsuspecting men into this devil's trap, and after drugging them into a state of insensibility, hands them over to the tender mercies of her hideous husband, who, after robbing them, casts them, perhaps, into some infernal pit beneath this house, there to die and rot!—Good God, what terrible iniquities are perpetrated in the very heart of this great city—iniquities which are unsuspected and unknown! ”

“ But above all things pass not to the hills right, for no man goes there; there away the forests are thick as night, and in their perpetual shadows are the ruins of a Hither city, a haunted fairy town to which some travellers have been, but whence none ever returned alive. ”

“ The great stricken city, hypnotised with its fear, was indifferent to everything else. The whole thing could be hidden, buried, annihilated. Then he saw himself again as he had been earlier in the night, standing in the moonlight of the balcony, peering into the room, into the depths of his degradation. 'No, no, enough, enough!' he snarled. And, seizing the little body with its possible spark of life, he rushed out into the street. ”

“ Through the whole night long upon the curb stones, at the corners, lounging against the windows and doors of closed houses or shops, this lower stratum of life appears with its atmosphere of dusky gloom. When the daylight dawns upon the city, it seems to shrivel up and shrink into the mouths of the yawning black cellars and foul alleys whose very breath is a deadly poison. ”

“ For the first time, I viewed with a tranquil mind the narrow, dirty, and unpaved streets, the blackened houses full of cracks running over the walls in all directions, lurking-places of the thieves and robbers who ply their calling on the streets, and who sometimes even break into houses in the city. ”

“ And the man who has projected a great burglary, perhaps a murder, steps forth from the old rickety house. He steps forth into the street and breathes a sigh of relief.
But the street also—the deserted, hushed street of the suburb, where the pure white snow of the fields grapples with the noisy city, and forcibly penetrates into it with its white streams—the street also terrifies the man when he is alone. Already night is on, but darkness is not yet to conceal him. Somewhere in the distance, before and behind, it coils itself up in the dark houses with their closed shutters ”

“ You're all alone in a deserted city. You walk down an empty street, yearning for the sight of one living face—one moving figure. Then you see a man on a corner and you know your terror has only begun. ”

“ The horror which lay over Metropolis was Paradise compared with the last, cruel destruction which the lump of humanity was invoking from the lowest and hottest of hells upon the city and its inhabitants. ”

“ The street was gorged with people on foot and on bicycles and in automobiles, fighting to get out of the city. He could hear screams and curses and over all, the faint crackle of flames.
In a few hours, the city would be a roaring inferno, he thought. There would be nobody left behind to put out the fires. ”

“ The city bore marks of havoc everywhere. Gaping bridges, half-demolished houses, many without doors, which had been taken off their hinges and cast into the courtyard or the roadside, fallen roofs, smouldering ruins, told their dismal tale. ”

“ Behind the gaunt specter of what had once been the city hall a blizzard of flame swept back into the gore between Turk and Market streets. Peeled of its heavy stone facing like a young leek that is stripped of its wrappings, the dome of the city hall rose spectral against the nebulous background of sparks.
From its summit looked down the goddess of justice, who had kept her pedestal even while the ones of masonry below her feet had been toppled to the earth in huge blocks the size of a freight car. ”

“ That makes all things the wraiths of things that were?
It touches, one by one, the wayside posts,
And they are gone, a line of hurrying ghosts.
It creeps upon the towns with stealthy feet,
And men are phantoms on a phantom street.{128}
It strikes the towers and they are shafts of air,
Above the spectres passing in the square.
The city turns to ashes, spire by spire;
The mountains perish with their peaks afire.
The fading city and the falling sky
Are swallowed in one doom without a cry.
It tracks the traveler fleeing with the gale,
Fleeing toward home and friends without avail ”

“ Many of them go insane and are taken to state institutions where death soon mercifully comes and wipes out their useless lives.
Many of them are cast forth from the dens where they have turned their every drop of blood to gold for their masters, and are picked up dead in the alleys and streets of the city. ”

“ Fear they had none, because they had known the shape of fear for forty-eight hours and to them it had no more terrors. Men overworked to the breaking point and women unnerved by hysteria dropped down on the cooling ashes and slept where they lay, for had they not seen the tall steel skyscrapers burn like a torch? Had they not beheld the cataracts of flame fleeting unhindered up the broad avenues, and over the solid blocks of the city? ”

“ But he who remains in the town with his property, or in the performance of his duty, is eager to conceal his family and goods. Long has the case been taken into consideration, and hiding-places ingeniously devised. If the city has more especially roused the fury of the enemy, it is threatened with fire, plunder, and the expulsion of the citizens. In such a case the people carry their money firmly sewed in their clothes. ”

“ There seems something so ghastly, so spectral, in the mockery of their unnecessary circuit, their impregnable strength, their countless towers, arrogating to themselves the circumference of a day's journey—and all for what? To guard a city, which, once dropsied with grandeur, has now shrunk with the disease into comparative atrophy; a city, which, having boastfully demanded their aid, has now abandoned them for miles. ”

“ In the city everyone radiates suspicion and death. They enjoy killing, thinking about killing, and planning for killing. This is natural selection, too, you realize. These are the survival traits that work best in the city. Outside the city men think differently. If they are threatened individually, they fight, as will any other creature. Under more general survival threats they co-operate completely with the rules for universal survival that the city people break."
"How did it begin—this separation, I mean, between the two groups?" Rhes asked.
"We'll probably never know," Jason said. ”

“ What cause the pessimist has for his boding views when in cities like New York, Quaker Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco, the City Halls, those centres of municipal life, hold and are ruled by the worst and most dangerous gangs of criminals sheltered by any roof in any city! ”

“ We see the ocean of scum and filth pouring down into the slough through the subterranean sewers of the City of Destruction and of the Town of Stupidity, which lies four degrees beyond the City of Destruction, and from many other of the houses and haunts of men. We see His Majesty’s sappers and miners at their wits’ end how to cope with the deluges of pollution that pour into this slough that they have been ordained to drain and dry up. ”

“ They will see the ruined gardens and orchards of buildings the use of which they can’t even guess. For many, many years London has lain deserted, because on account of the fighting in the country all round, no food could reach it, and all its people have fled. Wondering and afraid, believing, no doubt, all these decaying remains of luxury to be some magic device of demons, those rough warriors will hurry away from the silent city, leaving it to fall into still deeper ruin. ”

“ The looters early began operations in the stricken city. The vandal thinking that law and order had gone in the general crash filled his pockets as he fled.
It was the relic hunter who opened the door to the looter. The spirit which sends the tourist tapping about the ruins of the Parthenon, awoke in San Francisco. Idle and curious men swarmed into the city, poking about in the ruins in the hope of finding something worth carrying away as a souvenir of the greatest calamity of modern times.
Scores of men and women were seen digging in the ruins of one store. ”

“ There followed a tremendous shock which shook the building sideways and tossed it about with something like a spiral motion. When we reached the street people were running hither and thither.
“Fire was breaking out in hundreds of places over the city and the streets were becoming crowded with hurrying refugees. Where they were unable to procure horses, men and women had harnessed themselves to carriages and were drawing their belongings to places of safety. As we passed through the residence district where wealthy people lived we saw automobiles drawn up and loaded down before houses. ”

“ Jacobs said that she predicted that within a few years, Civic Center would be one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, a ghost-town at night, a place that sustained a thin crop of weedy booze shops and flea-pit motels. ”

“ It is needless to say that the laboring classes are indignant at the outrage, and that the city is constantly in the wildest commotion. In their part of the town they have dark secret excavations in the earth, entered by trap-doors and narrow passes, and in here are their opium-dens, and gambling-hells, and prostitution apartments. ”

“ While thousands of citizens escaped from the city, with their families, not knowing where they would find a refuge, and obeying only the impulse to get away from a place apparently doomed, other thousands remained, determined to protect their hearths and homes and to preserve their fair metropolis from destruction. Terrible as was the mob, and tenfold more terrible as it would have been if it had used its strength in an organized effort and with definite purpose, forces were now awakening and concentrating against it which would eventually destroy every vestige of lawlessness. ”

“ The proud and beautiful city had been shorn of its manifold glories, its palaces and vast commercial emporiums levelled to the earth and its wide area of homes, where dwelt a happy and a prosperous people, lay prostrate in thin ashes. Here and there in the charred ruins and the streets lately blackened by waves of flame, lay crushed or charred corpses, unheeded by the survivors, some of whom were fighting desperately for their lives and property, while others were panic stricken and paralyzed by fear. ”

“ The story as told by the authors, however, is one of absorbing interest that thrills the reader with emotion and depicts the scenes of terror, destruction, misery and suffering as vividly as if the reader were an eye-witness to all the details of the stupendous disaster.
The history of the Earthquake and Fire Horror is told consecutively and systematically from beginning to end.
“The Doomed City” is a pen picture of San Francisco while its destruction was impending. ”

“ Who will ever forget the marvelous rapidity with which the better streets were filled with a ruffianly and desperate multitude, such as in ordinary times we seldom see—creatures who seemed to have crept from their burrows and dens to join in the plunder of the city—how quickly certain houses were marked out for sacking and ruin, and what wild and brutal crimes were committed on the unoffending negroes? ”

“ The further extremity of the place was involved in a profound darkness which could not be dissipated by feeble rays of the lamp.
'Here,' said the Dead Man, addressing his prisoner—'you will be kept in confinement for the rest of your life—a confinement varied only by different modes of torture which I shall apply to you, from time to time. This dungeon is called the Chamber of Death—for what reason you will ere long find out. It is built directly under the sewers of the city, which accounts for the liquid filth that oozes through the ceiling. ”

“ Theoretically, it would have been possible to re-seal the City's dome and pump in an atmosphere that human beings could live with, but, aside from every other consideration, it was likely that such an atmosphere would ruin many of the artifacts within the City. ”

“ And in the hunting seasons, Morrison and Tony manage to steal away and chase the flying caribou and deer, and more than one lordly moose has been forced to succumb to their prowess and skill.
[THE END.] A SUBMERGED CITY.
It has happened many times in the history of the world that cities have fallen into decay, and finally disappeared so entirely that their existence has not been suspected by the ordinary traveler. ”

“ In some hells there is an appearance as of ruins of houses and cities after fires, in which ruins the infernal spirits dwell and conceal themselves. In the milder hells there is an appearance of rude cottages, in some cases contiguous, having the aspect of a city with lanes and streets. Within the houses are infernal spirits engaged in continual quarrels, enmities, blows, and fightings; in the streets and lanes robberies and depredations are committed. ”