‘I wonder how many were killed in the Grand and the Oriental Hotel?’ A young chap spoke up. ‘I was right in the entrance of our office when the shake shot me out on hands and knees, and when I tried to scramble up, it threw me down again. And in just that time that it took me to get to my knees and look back, these three shocks, coming rat-tat-tat, in the space of time that it would take you to clap your hands three times, the whole city had gone. I had faced a city of square mile on square mile of houses, great office-buildings, banks, hotels, stores, homes; and when I turned back again, it had vanished as if by some gigantic sweep of malevolent magic. As far as one could see was but a flat, irregular expanse of brick and wood. I couldn’t see half a dozen houses standing. And then it was all blotted out by the dust, thicker than the thickest fog. You could not see a foot before you. And then that was suddenly cleared, as if a curtain had been snatched away, by the typhoon that sprang up just then, the gale that Fate seemed to need to help the flames finish the destruction. I am a newspaperman, and I’ve been thinking how I’m going to write this. Phrases and images, monstrous incidents that have flickered before me all this afternoon, are running in my mind haphazard; but I can’t do it. It can’t be done. It’s too viciously, demoniacally monstrous.’

The others nodded, silently, approvingly, finding relief in hearing, in words which they themselves could not find, some expression of the feelings which swirled through their confused minds.

‘Some people rushed into the water at the Bund and sat there, just heads out, ducking them when the heat became too intense. I heard later that, when the flames became worse, some were dropped by the heat as they rushed across the Bund, and lay there to be roasted. I got to the park. It was filled with people and the flames on all sides made everything, even humans, so dry that we became inflammable, like tinder. Sparks, chunks of flaming debris, came flying among us. Clothing, even hair, caught fire in a moment. Luckily the mains had burst, and we sat in about a foot of water. One would see someone catching fire, literally having his clothes or hair spring into blaze, and then someone would slap a chunk of wet mud on him.

‘I was fool enough to get away from there. I wanted to see it all, but it’s a wonder I got through, just luck in dodging flames on all sides. There were dead everywhere. The canals were full of them. I heard that hundreds flocked into the Yokohama Specie Bank, which was still standing; but the flames came there, too. They couldn’t get out. There were flames all about them. So they were all roasted alive.’

Another took up the tale, and another—harrowing incidents of families wiped out, husbands watching wives burn, and mothers clawing with slender fingers at piles of masonry under which they could hear their children crying, while the flames were coming on, mercilessly. The United Club had come down in a heap; everyone of the usual noon-day tiffin crowd there had been killed. So-and-so had been crushed, So-and-so burned—familiar names, one’s intimates of yesterday. Already the disaster seemed strangely old, as if one had lived in this atmosphere of misery for many years; as if normal times, orderly routine of business and three meals a day were a thing remote, a long past period of peace. The mind lost all sense of ordinary proportion. Men who had lost every possession congratulated themselves on their good luck. By common thought it became regarded as almost indecent to deplore loss of mere property.