Page:Doom of the Great City - Hay - 1880.djvu/38

 Judge for yourselves. Do you suppose I can tell you? A man came down the station steps, as we terrified wretches cowered together below, loudly exclaiming:—

“I tell you, it’s damned nonsense; they be all killed in London!”

All killed! The words went to my heart like a knife. Can you fancy the very extravagance of dread? It was mine then. Can you imagine the utmost climax of terror? I knew it at that moment. How I looked, what I said or did, what I thought even, these things I know not. The awful pang had shot into my heart and brain, had benumbed my inmost soul.

Fear! It was scarcely such a sense: I had no thought of personal danger, hardly a recollection even of the too possible fate of those dear ones who were more to me than life; the agony that held me then, that has pursued me through sixty years of time to hold me now, was no common sense of fear. It was that overwhelming, all-mastering dread which men alone can know who are on a sudden taught their own immeasurable littleness; who are witnesses of some stupendous event, whose movement shows the hand sublime of Nature, the supremacy of offended God!

Yes, you know now, though I knew not then, the full extent of that hideous catastrophe: how, like the sudden overflow of Vesuvius upon the towns below; like of yore the wings of the angel of death had overshadowed the sleeping hosts of Assyria; or like that yet older tale, a world had sunk beneath the waters, so, in like manner, the fog had drawn over midnight London an envelope of murky death, within whose awful fold all that had life had died.

Can you understand now the train of reasoning which