and lay where they fell.

I ran as fast as I could. But it was impossible to run far. Every
street and alley vomited men--all struggling together, fighting,
shouting, or shrieking, striking one another down, trampling over
the fallen--a hideous melee. There was an incessant rattling noise
in the air, and heavier peals as of thunder shook the houses. Here
a wide rent yawned in a wall--there a roof caved in--the windows
fell into the street in showers of broken glass.

How I got through this inferno I do not know. Buffeted and blinded,
stumbling and scrambling to my feet again, turning this way or
that way to avoid the thickest centres of the strife, oppressed and
paralyzed by a feeling of impotence that put an iron band around
my heart, driven always by the intense longing to reach my wife and
child, somehow I had a sense of struggling on. Then I came into a
quieter quarter of the town, and ran until I reached the lodging
where I had left them.

They were waiting just inside the door, anxious and trembling. But
I was amazed to find them so little panic-stricken. The little girl
had her doll in her arms.

[Illustration with caption: The cathedral spire... was swaying and
rocking in the air like the mast of a ship at sea.] "What is it?"
asked my wife. "What must we do?"

"Come," I cried. "Something frightful has happened here. I can't
explain now. We must get away at once. Come, quickly."