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careless foot which may be lifted to make the destruction more complete.

Human ants tunnelled beneath mounds of tumbled roofing iron, timbers, bricks and fractured concrete, smashed household furniture, splintered glass—a chaos which had been an orderly array of shops and dwellings only yesterday. They tunnelled ceaselessly, forcing their ways to where helpless fellows cried wildly for succour, or moaned and wept in terror or unbearable pain.

Some worked in purposeful silence, their gleaming, sweating bodies almost bare, their mouths agape and parched with the heat and the everlasting dust, their muscles aching with long-sustained effort, contemptuous of the death which hovered as they tore a path through the trembling wreckage. Others worked timidly, delving downwards and throwing the debris well clear, terrified at every faint tremor and prepared to leap to safety at the first renewed growling of the unquiet earth.

Surely these latter possessed fined courage, dreading yet daring?

At one spot a crowd of people stood silent and helpless, watching thick, flame-shot smoke belching from the ruins of a corner store. Silent, save for an occasional hysterical sob or a savage oath, when childish voices screamed in terror as the flames ate their way inexorably to where a number of children were imprisoned beneath the fallen verandah. Near the burning mass were men in partial uniform, firemen deprived of their principal weapon by the breaking of the water-mains, shielding their faces with uplifted arms and making futile dashes into the flames in an attempt at rescue.

The fire roared at them derisively, played with them. It allowed them to wrench up a corner of a sheet of the iron which roofed the fallen verandah, it allowed them to see the children pinned down upon the pavement, then it threw them back with a scorching tongue. The iron clanged down again.