With my next
glance at the city I was turned almost sick.

"The ground was shaking beneath me and I thought that the end of the
world was at hand. Buildings were falling to the right and left. The
earth was groaning and rocking, and flames were shooting high into the
sky. Soon the sound of the dynamiting reached us and buildings began
to fly in the air like fireworks.

"The sea lashed itself into a fury and beat upon the shores as if it
too sought to escape nature's wrath. Over across the bay all was
disorder. In the glare of the blood red flames reflected against sky
and sea, white robed, half naked men and women could be seen wildly
running about.

"Some of them ran to the water's edge and threw themselves in and
others less frantic had to battle with them to haul them out.

"It seemed as if every man, woman and child in 'Frisco was running
toward the ferry docks. When the boat arrived on our side of the shore
it was packed with men and women, none of whom seemed to be in their
right senses. Many of them jumped from the boat as soon as it was made
fast and ran at top speed through the streets of Oakland until forced
to fall through sheer exhaustion.

"One woman in the crowd had nothing on but a night gown. In her arms
she carried a 3-year-old girl who was hanging tightly to a rag doll
and seemed to be the only one in the vast crowd that was unafraid.
Where all these people went to I have no idea.

"I stood on the Oakland side watching 'Frisco devoured. In a space of
time so short that it all seems to me like a dream now the whole city,
slumbering peacefully but a moment before, presented a perdition
beside which Dante's inferno seems to pale into insignificance."

The looters early began operations in the stricken city. The vandal
thinking that law and order had gone in the general crash filled his
pockets as he fled.

It was the relic hunter who opened the door to the looter. The spirit
which sends the tourist tapping about the ruins of the Parthenon,
awoke in San Francisco. Idle and curious men swarmed into the city,
poking about in the ruins in the hope of finding something worth
carrying away as a souvenir of the greatest calamity of modern times.

Scores of men and women were seen digging in the ruins of one store.
They were disinterring bits of crockery, china and glassware.
Strangely enough, a great deal of this sort of ware had been protected
by a wall which stood through quake and fire. One woman