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ing, submerging brogue, lilt, dialect and accent in one common speech, levelling class distinctions, attaining a homogeneity impossible in older and more crowded communities.

In its power to shock, the disaster assumed the aspect of an overwhelming family catastrophe in these first few hours.

From Pandora in the north, from The Bluff a thousand miles to the south, and from every town and city in the length and breadth of the country between, Napier and Hastings had attracted native sons and daughters to build their rapidly-increasing populations. The prosperity of the district, its reputation for sunshine and its natural attractions, had been lodestones to draw and hold the ambitious and the pleasure-loving, who had built these towns, towns which had given promises of rivalling the cities in commercial importance.

And on this night every town and city, every hamlet and pah, in the length and breadth of the country, was astir—and would be astir during all the hours of darkness—awaiting the fragmentary tidings of death and destruction broadcasted by nameless heroes beneath whose feet the restless earth still quivered, grumbled and shook.

Harley scanned the brief list of names of the identified dead. He experienced no sense of relief when he saw that the names of his wife and child were not mentioned. These were Hastings’ dead. Grace and Joan were in Napier, fifteen miles north of Hastings, in the very centre of the earthquake area, and the crowd about him whispered that the death-roll in Napier already exceeded five hundred; that the town was utterly destroyed; that fire had rendered it for ever impossible to calculate the loss of life accurately; that the majority of the dead would never be found, being reduced to unrecognisable ashes; that the death-roll would eventually run into thousands!