city was prepared for the terrible event so
near at hand, when, at thirteen minutes past five o'clock on the dread
morning of the 18th, they felt their beds lifted beneath them as if by
a Titan hand, heard the crash of falling walls and ceilings, and saw
everything in their rooms tossed madly about, while through their
windows came the roar of an awful disaster from the city without.

It was a matter not of minutes, but of seconds, yet on all that coast,
long the prey of the earthquake, no shock like it had ever been felt,
no such sudden terror awakened, no such terrible loss occasioned as in
those few fearful seconds. Again and again the trembling of the earth
passed by, three quickly repeated shocks, and the work of the demon of
ruin was done. People woke with a start to find themselves flung from
their beds to the floor, many of them covered with the fragments of
broken ceilings, many lost among the ruins of falling floors and walls,
many pinned in agonizing suffering under the ruins of their houses,
which had been utterly wrecked in those fatal seconds. Many there were,
indeed, who had been flung to quick if not to instant death under their
ruined homes.

Those seconds of the reign of the elemental forces had turned the
gayest, most careless city on the continent into a wreck which no words
can fitly describe. Those able to move stumbled in wild panic across the
floors of their heaving houses, regardless of clothing, of treasures, of
everything but the mad instinct for safety, and rushed headlong into the
streets, to find that the earth itself had yielded to the energy of its
frightful interior forces and had in places been torn and rent like the
houses themselves. New terrors assailed the fugitives as fresh tremors
shook the solid ground, some of them strong enough to bring down
shattered walls and chimneys, and bring back much of the mad terror of
the first fearful quake. The heaviest of these came at eight o'clock.
While less forcible than that which had caused the work of destruction,
it added immensely to the panic and dread of the people and put many of
the wanderers to flight, some toward the ferry, the great mass in the
direction of the sand dunes and Golden Gate Park.

The spectacle of the entire population of a great city thus roused
suddenly from slumber by a fierce earthquake shock and sent flying into
the streets in utter panic, where not buried under falling walls or
tumbling debris, is one that can