ved
having either been dug out of the ruins afterward or cast forth by the
counter-motion as the earth rocked to and fro in the second shock. It
was as if the city had been lifted up _en masse_, and then thrown back
with the foundations uppermost--upside down, in fact. Don Tomas de la
G---- happened to be in the plaza in front of the church when the shock
came: in the endeavor to steady himself he grasped a tree close by; the
tree was uprooted, throwing him violently forward; then suddenly
reversing its course in an exactly opposite direction, it flung him off
to a great distance, bruising him severely. While clinging to the tree
he beheld the church in front of him, a new and handsome edifice,
literally lifted up bodily into the air and then overturned with an
appalling crash, "not one stone left upon another." If this had occurred
an hour or two previously, hundreds would have perished within the
walls, for there had been religious services in the church until a late
hour, it being the Friday before Holy Week, termed by Spanish Catholics
_Viernes del Concilio_.

Don Tomas de la G---- described the whole scene as something too
terrible for the imagination to conceive. After the stupendous crash
caused by the falling of the houses, for a few moments there ensued an
awful silence: then, amid the impenetrable darkness caused by the cloud
of dust from the fallen walls, which totally obscured the murky light of
a clouded moon, there arose a cry of anguish from those without--a wail
as of one great voice of stricken humanity; then the answering smothered
groan of those buried beneath the ruins--a cry like nothing human,
rising as it did from the very bowels of the earth.

There ensued a scene the harrowing details of which can never be fully
given--the search of the living and uninjured for those dead, dying or
imprisoned ones who lay beneath the great masses of stone and mortar.
Sometimes, in answer to the desperate cries of those outside or already
rescued, smothered, almost inaudible cries for help might be heard, so
faint as to seem scarcely human, and yet growing fainter and fainter
still, until those who were working for the release of the captive
became aware that their labor was in vain, and that only a corpse lay
beneath their feet. No light could be obtained in this stifling Erebus
of dust and darkness: all means of obtaining light had been buried in
the undistinguishable mass, and where lighted lamps were overtur