and a half
miles up the valley and looming one hundred feet in height from base to
top. Behind it were piled the waters, a great, ponderous mass, like the
treasured wrath of fate. Their surface was about three hundred feet
above the deserted town.

If Noah's neighbors thought it would be only a little shower the people
of Johnstown were yet more foolish. The railroad officials had
repeatedly told them that the dam threatened destruction. They still
perversely lulled themselves into a false security. The blow came, when
it did, like a flash. It was as if the heavens had fallen in liquid fury
upon the earth. It was as if ocean itself had been precipitated into an
abyss. The slow but inexorable march of the mightiest glacier of the
Alps, though comparable, was not equal to this in force. The whole of a
Pyramid, shot from a colossal catapult, would not have been the petty
charge of a pea shooter to it. Imagine Niagara, or a greater even than
Niagara, falling upon an ordinary collection of brick and wooden houses.

An Inconceivable Force.

The South Fork Reservoir was the largest in the United States, and it
contained millions of tons of water. When its fetters were loosened,
crumbling before it like sand, a building or even a rock that stood in
its path presented as much resistance as a card house. The dread
execution was little more than the work of an instant.

The flood passed over the town as it would over a pile of shingles,
covering over or carrying with it everything that stood in its way. It
bounded down the valley, wreaking destruction and death on each hand and
in its fore. Torrents that poured down out of the wilds of the mountains
swelled its volume.

All along from the point of its release it bore debris and corpses as
its hideous trophies. In a very brief time it displayed some of both, as
if in hellish glee, to the horrified eyes of Pittsburg, seventy-eight
miles west of the town of Johnstown that had been, having danced them
along on its exultant billows or rolled them over and over in the depths
of its dark current all the way through the Conemaugh, the Kiskiminitas
and the Allegheny river.

It was like a fearful monster, gnashing its dripping jaws in the scared
face of the multitude, in the flesh of its victims.

One eye-witness of the effects of the deluge declares that he saw five
hundred dead bodies. Hundreds were counted by others. It will take many
a day to make up the death roll. It will t