earth, when, quivering in wrath, she opens her fiery mouth or hurls her
rocky missiles at pigmy men.

From the wrecked train a great many travellers had jumped like myself;
but not all with the same happy result. They had mostly reached the
ground more or less bruised, but at the moment of escape from the clutch
of death we do not much feel our hurts. These unhappy victims,
frightened as they were, had managed to creep and hide behind the
untouched portion of the bulwark, and happy to have escaped from
immediate death, sheltered from the tremendous cataract of stones, they
remained quiet, trembling, awaiting the end of the catastrophe and the
ultimate rescue. But what had meanwhile become of those who had stayed
in the falling carriages?

There came a terrible answer to that question, and out of the old horror
arose a new and still more terrible spectre. A demon with a cloudy head,
rising from the darkness below, and with a swift and fearful growth,
mounting up to the sky--a demon with a thousand glistening, sparkling
eyes and tongues, a smoke-fiend!

The great boiler of the locomotive had gone down first. There it fell,
not on the ground, but on a large fragment of rock, which pierced it
completely, so that the air had free access to the fire. Upon the top of
both boiler and tender, the coal-van had been turned upside down, and
these had pulled all the carriages one on top of the other in the same
way, so that the whole train stood upright, like some huge steeple. This
dreadful structure had become a great funeral pile, the altar of a black
pagan idol whose fiery tongues were greedily thrusting upward to devour
their prey.