Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [69]
And still we were dancing this unhappy dance, whilst about us the music of this dance, this monstrous snarl was rising. One continuous ugly noise. All over the city, everyone and everything joining in. It mattered little if people danced, people were always dancing but what if buildings danced, imagine that, and what if a whole city began to dance, imagine that. And the snarl reached its ghastly climax. And then? Silence.
That was how it felt. But how did it look? On St Lekk’s Hill, overlooking Entralla, one man reported that he could actually see the city sway like a field of corn in the wind. But buildings don’t sway, buildings are supposed to keep still, that’s what we like about them. Buildings don’t like to sway, it upsets them, they go on strike, they revolt, they give up. From his advantageous position the witness saw that the buildings were indeed beginning to give up, but he saw it only for a second because then a vast cloud of dust began to rise and with it the witness immediately lost his usefulness.
In the city that fateful morning it was no benign cloud that had risen but a hurricane of stone dust which howled about the toppling streets, it blocked out the sun, turned our city to night, darker, darker than any night, it shrieked in and out of the broken windows of the thousands of now disintegrating rooms, it blew people against walls and out of buildings, it was a shriek and a howl in direct competition with the snarl of the earth, and within it, like the sounding of a triangle barely heard in a swelling concert, glass cracked, steel snapped, whole buildings groaned, but there was not a single human sound. Not yet.
The city, too excited by this metamorphosis, began to get carried away, in the epicentre of the quake, reckoned to have been on People Street, it behaved with particular cruelty towards its structures. The whole street was lacerated, its buildings flung this way and that, pavements rose four metres, houses sunk until they could no longer be seen, gas pipes were ripped open, electricity lines torn away from their poles and in desperate spasms flung themselves everywhere, whipping the shattered street and its shattered buildings, starting fires. Now in fear the bells of all our churches began to toll, clanged by some unseen, petrified hand, as if our city was opening its throat and calling out for help.
So many people of Entralla that morning felt the earth give way beneath them, or saw through rhombus windows, in the dimness, that the houses across the way were being played with as if they were paper places. They were being torn into little balls and hurled along streets for kilometres and finally deposited, as if suddenly the game had been abandoned, at an entirely different address.
The world, the whole world, the people of Entralla would have you believe, and they were convincing enough, was at an end. And who could doubt them, for just then in our old school on Littsen Street the geography classroom on the second floor tumbled to the ground, shattering in the playground, and for a moment the sky was filled with pages of textbooks and children’s essays, from the excellent to the appalling, peacefully floating downwards, essays on every country in the world. And the several globes of that classroom broke free from their stands and began to roll hurriedly down Littsen Street, free at last, until they finally stopped at the bottom of the street, no longer legible and misshapen now with dents and with an ashy grey colour covering them as if the earth had become the moon.
Tall buildings could be seen fainting onto smaller buildings who could not or would not carry their weight. A grandmother on the ground floor of a house on Wilm Lintel Road saw her two grandchildren, one a boy, one a girl, smile at her in a strange way quite out of keeping