Jack London (1906)
On a Wednesday morning at a quarter past five came the earthquake. A minute later the
flames were leaping upward. In a dozen different quarters south of Market Street, fires started.
There was no organization, no communication. All the cunning adjustments of a twentieth-century
city had been smashed by the earthquake. The streets were humped into ridges and piled with the
debris of fallen walls. The steel rails were twisted into horizontal angles. The telephone and
telegraph systems were disrupted. And the great water-mains had burst. All the shrewd
contrivances and safeguards of man had been thrown out of gear by thirty seconds' twitching of
earth-crust.
This passage is a
because​