A Crack in the Edge of the World Read Online Free

by most English-speakers North America and particularly in and around the fragile and rather delicately constructed young northern city of San Francisco, a number of people grasped all too quickly that something of immensesignificance was happening. And if they were sensible and observant they took care to note and remember exactly when it all began, and we have their memories set down for us still.
    In the city it was a little after five by the local clocks and still not yet light (though some speak of a rosy glow just discernible behind the hill named Mount Diablo, to the east). The air was cold and moist in the way that spring mornings often are in Northern California. But there is a robust heartiness about those who choose to live in this corner of America, and, in spite of the chill and the gloom of this particular morning, a man of middle years, described in the directories simply as a laborer, was already in the sea taking his morning constitutional: This involved swimming through the rough-breaking waters of the Pacific, a few yards off the shore at Ocean Beach.
    At the same moment, five city miles away, a young reporter was walking home with two friends, having completed the routine tasks of what newspapermen were in those days starting to call “the graveyard shift.” He had stopped on Larkin Street near City Hall to smoke a cigarette and exchange pleasantries with a pair of patrolling policemen, and so further secure these necessary professional connections.
    A professor of geology—an immensely eminent man of sixty-three who had been honored around the world for painstakingly exploring and mapping the Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and a score of other remote and dramatic wildernesses besides—was lying asleep in a room at the Faculty Club at the University of California.
    The head of the City Weather Bureau, a future professor at Harvard College, an expert on frost, and at the time an enthusiastic advocate for naming the study of weather “aerography,” was also asleep, in his house at 3016½ Clay Street. But, as was his custom, he slept lightly, and kept a flashlight, a watch, an already-date-stamped notebook, and a pencil on the table beside his pillow so that he might be ready for whatever mayhem—aerographic or meteorological or otherwise naturally made—the night might throw at him.
    And an elderly English astronomer, the founder of the first real observatory in California, a man of great energy and yet one whose careerhad precipitated no little controversy and disappointment and who had just retired at the age of eighty-one from the post of professor of geography at the University of California, was lying half awake in his house at 2221 Washington Street, on that fashionable square in Pacific Heights known as Lafayette Park.
    AT THE PRECISE MOMENT when the members of this quintet—three of them very distinguished men of science and two others of relatively modest social standing—were undertaking their very mundane activities of swimming or walking or chatting or sleeping or drowsing, with most of them unknown to one another and each certainly unaware of the others’ exact circumstances at that second, it was twelve minutes after five o’clock in the morning.
    However, this was a matter of provable fact only for the Englishman, so far as the record relates. His name was George Davidson, and he, like his fellow scientists, wrote about the event that was to follow with a certain icy detachment. He took care to mark the time that he first noticed something happening: Suddenly and without warning his room, his house, and the very land all was standing upon began to shake, with a great, ever-increasing, and uncontrollable violence.
    It was, he knew full well, an earthquake.
    It came, he later reported,
    from north to south, and the only description I am able to give of its effect is that it seemed like a terrier shaking a rat. I was in bed, but