iece of machinery working
backwards. The servants went indoors again, looking about them
stupidly, as do those who go over a house which they are leaving for
the last time. Simon, as in a dream, saw one of them cramming a canvas
bag with the gilt candlesticks and silver boxes of which he had
charge, while another wrapped himself in a tablecloth and a third
filled his pockets with bread and biscuits. He himself, turning by
instinct to a small cloak-room on the ground floor, put on a leather
jacket and changed his shoes for a pair of heavy shooting-boots. He
heard his father saying:

"Here, take my pocket-book. There's money in it, bundles of notes:
you'd better have it. . . ."

Suddenly the electric light went out; and at the same time they heard,
in the distance, a strange thunder-clap, curiously different from the
usual sound of thunder. It was repeated, with a less strident din,
accompanied by a subterranean rattling; and then, growing noisier
again, it burst a second time in a series of frightful detonations,
louder than the roar of artillery.

Then there was a frantic rush for the road. But the fugitives had not
left the garden when the frightful catastrophe, announced by so many
manifestations, occurred. The earth leapt beneath their feet and
instantly fell away and leapt again like an animal in convulsions.

Simon and his father were thrown against each other and then violently
torn apart and hurled to the ground. All around them was the
stupendous uproar of a tottering world in which everything was
collapsing into an incredible chaos. The darkness seemed to have grown
denser than ever. And then, suddenly, there was a less distant sound,
a sound which touched them, so to speak, a sort of cracking noise. And
shrieks rose into the air from the very bowels of the earth.

"Stop!" cried Simon, catching hold of his father, whom he had
succeeded in rejoining. "Stop!"

He felt before him, at a distance of a few inches, the utter horror of
a gaping abyss; and it was from the bottom of the abyss that the
shrieks and howls of their companions rose.

And there were three more shocks. . . .

Simon realized a moment later that his father, clutching his arm, was
dragging him away with fierce energy. Both were clambering up the road
at a run, groping their way like blind men through the obstacles with
which the earthquake had covered it.

M. Dubosc had a goal in view, the Caude-Cote cliff, a bare plateau
where they wo