You saw those pictures of the ruins of Arica, about which our talk began;
and from them you can guess well enough for yourself what a town looks
like which has been ruined by an earthquake. Of the misery and the
horror which follow such a ruin I will not talk to you, nor darken your
young spirit with sad thoughts which grown people must face, and ought to
face. But the strangeness of some of the tricks which the earthquake
shocks play is hardly to be explained, even by scientific men. Sometimes,
it would seem, the force runs round, making the solid ground eddy, as
water eddies in a brook. For it will make straight rows of trees
crooked; it will twist whole walls round--or rather the ground on which
the walls stand--without throwing them down; it will shift the stones of
a pillar one on the other sideways, as if a giant had been trying to spin
it like a teetotum, and so screwed it half in pieces. There is a story
told by a wise man, who saw the place himself, of the whole furniture of
one house being hurled away by an earthquake, and buried under the ruins
of another house; and of things carried hundreds of yards off, so that
the neighbours went to law to settle who was the true owner of them.
Sometimes, again, the shock seems to come neither horizontally in waves,
nor circularly in eddies, but vertically, that is, straight up from
below; and then things--and people, alas! sometimes--are thrown up off
the earth high into the air, just as things spring up off the table if
you strike it smartly enough underneath. By that same law (for there is
a law for every sort of motion) it is that the earthquake shock sometimes
hurls great rocks off a cliff into the valley below. The shock runs
through the mountain till it comes to the cliff at the end of it; and
then the face of the cliff, if it be at all loose, flies off into the
air. You may see the very same thing happen, if you will put marbles or
billiard-balls in a row touching each other, and strike the one nearest
you smartly in the line of the row. All the balls stand still, except