credible. "Down the
slopes of Bandai-san, across the valley of the Nagase-gawa, choking up
the river, and stretching beyond it to the foothills, five or six
miles away, swept a vast, billowy sheet of ash-covered earth or mud,
obliterating every foot of the erstwhile smiling landscape. Here and
there the eyes rested on huge, disordered heaps of rocky debris, in
the distance resembling nothing so much as the giant, concrete, black
substructure of some modern breakwater. It was curious to see on the
farther side the sharp line of demarkation between the brown sea of
mud and the green forests on which it had encroached; or, again, the
lakes formed in every tributary glen of the Nagase-gawa by the massive
dams so suddenly raised against the passage of their stream waters.
One lake was conspicuous among the rest. It was there that the
Nagase-gawa itself had been arrested at its issue from a narrow pass
by a monster barrier of disrupted matter thrown right across its
course. Neither living thing nor any sign of life could be discerned
over the whole expanse. All was dismally silent and solitary. Beneath
it, however, lay half a score of hamlets, and hundreds of corpses of
men, women and children, who had been overtaken by swift and painful
deaths."

Although the little village of Nagasaka was comparatively uninjured,
nearly all its able-bodied inhabitants lost their lives in a manner
which shows the extraordinary speed with which the mud-stream flowed.
When Little Bandai-san blew up, and hot ashes and sand began to fall,
the young and strong fled panic-stricken across the fields, making for
the opposite hills by paths well known to all. A minute later came a
thick darkness, as of midnight. Blinded by this, and dazed by the
falling debris and other horrors of the scene, their steps, probably
also their senses, failed them. And before the light returned every
soul was caught by a swift bore of soft mud, which, rushing down the
valley bed, overwhelmed them in a fate more horrible and not less
sudden than that of Pharaoh and his host. None escaped save those who
stayed at home--mostly the old and very young.

A terrible earthquake convulsed central Japan on the morning of
October 25, 1891. The waves of disturbance traversed thirty-one
provinces, over which the earth's crust was violently shaken for ten
minutes together, while slighter shocks were felt for a distance of
400 miles to the north, and traveled under the sea a like dis