at one another, and the thoughts of many wandered anxiously from the
sacred building. Outside, the streets were empty. All Caracas was
engaged in public worship; and the white dwellings that inclosed the
Plaza, with its converging avenues, looked silently down upon deserted
pavements, echoing only now and then to the careless tread of a party of
negroes, or to the clattering heel of some undevout trooper. The sun had
a glow as of molten copper; the atmosphere was dense; but not a cloud
occupied the heavens. Towards evening the churches and the cathedral
were again emptied, and the throng of worshippers, streaming out into
the streets, prepared to witness the great religious procession that was
to close the ceremonies of the holy day. Still the declining sun glowed
with unnatural intensity of hue; and the evening breeze swept over the
town in unusually fitful and stormy gusts. The air seemed to be laden
with mysterious melancholy, to sigh with a hidden presage of some awful
calamity to come.

Of a sudden it came. A shudder, a tremor, a quivering shock ran, for
hundreds of miles simultaneously, through Venezuela. A groan, swelling
thunderously and threateningly into a hollow roar, burst from the
tortured earth, and swallowed up in its convulsive rumbling the shrieks
of an entire nation suddenly inwrapt in the shadow and agony of death.
For a moment,--as if a supernatural hand were painfully lifting it from
its inmost core,--the earth rocked and heaved through all Venezuela; and
then, almost before the awful exclamation, _El temblor!_ had time to
burst from the lips of that stricken nation, it bounded from the bonds
that held it, and in a moment was quaking, heaving, sliding, surging,
rolling, in awful semblance to the sea. Great gulfs opened and closed
their jaws, swallowing up and again belching forth dwellings, churches,
human beings, overtaken by instantaneous destruction.