demons were waging war, and undermining the roof in their senseless fury.

In some places whole blocks of houses were blazing; here and there high
buildings burned in solitary grandeur, the flames leaping from every window
or boiling from the roof. Sometimes one of these buildings would disappear
in a shower of sparks and an awful roar, or a row of humbler houses was
lifted bodily from the ground to burst into a thousand particles of flying
wood, and disappear.

The heat was overpowering (she bathed her face constantly from the pitcher)
and the roar of the flames, the constant explosions of dynamite, the loud
vicious crackling of wood, the rending and splitting of masonry, the hoarse
impact of walls as they met the earth, was the scene's wild orchestral
accompaniment and, despite underlying apprehension and horror, gave Gora
one of the few pleasurable sensations of her life.

But she moved her chair after a moment and fixed her gaze, no longer rapt
but ironic, on the flaming hillcrests, the long line of California Street,
nucleus of the wealth and fashion of San Francisco. The Western Addition
was fashionable and growing more so, but it had been too far away for the
pioneers of the fifties and sixties, the bonanza kings of the seventies,
the railroad magnates of the eighties, and they had built their huge and
hideous mansions upon the hill that rose almost perpendicularly above the
section where they made and lost their millions. Some wag or toady had
named it Nob Hill and the inhabitants had complacently accepted the title,
although they refrained from putting it on their cards. And now it was in
flames.