ard by the pricking consciousness of something
strange. It was a moment before she realized that she had never seen a
sky just like that before. Her back was to the east, and although the
sun was rising it was still low; at this stage of the dawn the sky was
generally gray. This morning it was a ghastly electric blue. And then,
while her eyes were still staring, and something in her brain moving
towards expression, she heard a noise that sounded like the roar of
artillery charging across the world. She fancied it rushing through the
Golden Gate and up the bays and marsh, before it hurled itself with a
vicious and personal violence against the wall beneath her window. She
braced herself against the sash as the house shook in the strongest
earthquake she had ever felt. It appeared to be brief, however, and she
was turning away to dress herself, when it commenced again with a fury
and violence of which she had never dreamed the modern earth to be
capable. She threw herself on her knees the better to grip the
window-ledge, but her only sensations were surprise and an intense
expectation. Electric flames, as blue and ghastly as the reeling sky,
were playing all over the marsh, she saw the long bare line of Tamalpais
charge down and up like a colossal seesaw; and in that terrific plunging
and dancing, that abrupt leaping from one point of the compass to the
opposite, or towards all at once, that hysterical shaking and struggling
as if two planets had rushed from their orbits and were fighting for
life in midspace, Isabel expected the entire globe to stand on end, and
was convinced that the finish of California, at least, had come. She had
read of earthquakes that lasted for hours, and even days, and no doubt
this one was merely getting up steam, for it increased in violence and
momentum every second. The house rattled like a big dice-box. She
expected it to leap down the slope into the shivering marsh. Pieces of
rock fell down the face of the cliff opposite, but so great was the roar
of the earthquake, so close the sound of creaking and straining timbers,
of falling chimneys, and china, and even plaster, that she could not
hear the impact as they struck the ground and bounded high in air.

Then, there was a bulge of the earth upward, a twist that seemed to
wrench the house from its foundations, and the earthquake ceased as
suddenly as it had come. Isabel waited a few moments for it to return,
incredulous that the mighty forces