Restless Earth/Chapter 13

The car was passing through Waipawa when the driver spoke again.

The principal street of the small town bore evidence of the severity of the shake. Splintered glass and tumbled wreckage, which yesterday morning were neat shop-fronts, littered the roadway and imposed caution and low speed.

“We won’t be in Hastings before daylight, at this rate,” he growled. “Look at that!” he added in awe.

The extensive concrete parapet of a building lay shattered in the roadway. A group of men stood regarding it in silence. They stood with their hands in their pockets, for the morning breeze was chill, and seemed to wait for something. They did not look up as the car passed.

Many people stood in the roadway in groups; men, women and children, moving reluctantly or resentfully to allow the travellers passage. All seemed silent; even the sleepy children who clung to the hands of their parents. The whole town was awake, desirous of sleep, but lacking the courage ​to retire, fearful of a repetition of the shake which would completely destroy the town—as report stated Hastings and Napier had been destroyed.

“Windy!” commented the driver, referring to the state of mind of the inhabitants. “And I don’t blame ’em. We must be well into the outside ripples of the shake now. This place seems to have got it much worse than Waipukurau.”

Waipukurau, the town through which they had passed a few minutes before, had, indeed, suffered less; or so it seemed in the darkness. There the people had seemed less fearful, having courage to walk upon the pavements and beneath shop-verandahs. Here the people seemed afraid to leave the centre of the road.

“Dear me!” muttered the elderly man in shocked tones. “Dear me!”

Roy, lacking encouragement, discontinued his efforts to be interesting. He stepped upon the accelerator as the car swung clear of the town. For the best part of a mile the road lay straight before him, and the car immediately ahead was drawing away rapidly. Professional pride demanded that he reduce the distance between with all possible speed.

Consequently the car was travelling too fast to be effectually braked before it hurdled a long, low mound of broken earth which crossed the road diagonally, a wrinkle in the earth’s crust which extended for more than two miles across country—a frozen ripple of the earthquake—and Harley was thrown against the windscreen with a force which dazed him and cracked the glass.

The car screeched to a stop.

“Anybody hurt?” asked Roy anxiously, turning in his seat.

The elderly man rubbed his bruised knees and ejaculated “Dear me!” several times. His wife, crumpled upon the floor of the car, hunched her shoulders in anticipation of immediate death, and was silent. The daughter slid back into her seat and ​stared at the driver in a dazed manner, as though her memory had gone astray.

Harley allowed his head to drop backwards for a few moments, then he turned upon the driver in mild anger.

“What are we waiting for?” he asked.

Roy alighted and opened the back door to assist the elderly woman to her seat. When he had satisfied himself that she was frightened rather than hurt, he walked around the car, examining the tyres and testing the springs.

“Still all in one piece,” he announced cheerfully, as he climbed behind the wheel again. “We’re lucky. She might have rolled over on us.”

“Let’s get on!” snapped Harley irritably. “What are we wasting time for?”

As Roy good-humouredly pressed the starter button, a gleaming limousine snored past and raced ahead. From its crowded interior sounded shrill peals of excited laughter.

“Evidently this buck-jumping business appeals to that crowd,” he said, ignoring Harley’s question. “Hope they break their blooming necks.”

As though in answer to his pious wish, the limousine swerved, skidded violently, and came to a stop at an acute angle in the ditch at the side of the road. A small crowd of terrified girls and youths scrambled from it into the roadway.

The oncoming taxi honked imperiously and sped by, profiting by the limousine’s swerve and avoiding the small patch of shattered macadam which had ditched it.

“Let ’em walk,” grinned Roy, ignoring the cries for assistance. “Do ’em good, even if it doesn’t teach ’em manners.”

Presently the car drew in behind the long line of vehicles moving across the country with the caution of traffic in a city street which bears the warning “Road Up.” The hills on either side were cracked, and the cracks extended across the road in places, ​compelling a more seemly advance upon the wasted towns.

Harley chafed in spirit, and occasionally muttered in his impatience. For him the slower speed had become a sluggish crawl. He longed for wings that he might fly swiftly—to what? To a small heap of black ashes? The ashes would not depart before he arrived, no matter how slow his speed. Could it be that he had hope that Grace and Joan lived?

He laughed aloud, bitterly.

Roy shot him a rapid glance of suspicion.

“Take a grip on yourself, Mr. Harley,” he advised. “You’ve got too much imagination.”

“Can’t we go faster?” asked Harley, ignoring the advice. “We’re simply crawling.”

“We could, but I’m not anxious to land in a hole and wreck the bus. We’ll just take it easy and tail along behind.”

They “tailed along behind” for many miles, studiously following the car ahead, dropping to a lower gear to negotiate the more frequent fractures in the road surface; making small detours to avoid those places where the road had subsided dangerously, and assisting to make new traffic-ruts where it had been pushed out of alignment.

Infreqently they passed cars ditched or disabled, their occupants taking advantage of every passing headlight to effect manoeuvres or repairs. None offered assistance. On this night car-drivers were independent of necessity. If they fell out of the pleasure-seeking procession they expected no sympathy, as they expended none. The show was on, and it was everyone for himself if he would obtain a good view of it. Who knew how long the show would be accessible or free?

“This is where it catches ’em,” Roy remarked, with a self-satisfied smirk, as they passed a number of cars stranded in soft clay beside the uncertain road. “They’re all right while the going is good, ​but they haven’t learned how to dodge shell-holes. I served my time behind the wheel of an ambulance in France. That was the place for rough going. This is nothing. Over there we didn’t give two hoots what happened to the bus so long as the wheels would go round. Hang on!”

The car bumped over another mound of rubble, then pickgd up a little speed as the car ahead drew away again.

On this final thirty miles of road the southward traffic became more frequent. A hospital ambulance came around the bend ahead and passed with fiercely-gleaming lights and ringing bell. Harley caught a glimpse of grey blankets and a woman’s stooping back in the lighted interior.

“He’s moving,” remarked Roy admiringly.

“Why can’t we?” asked Harley in a high-pitched voice. “The road must be fairly safe.”

“For those who know it, perhaps. That ambulance has travelled this road a lot during the last twelve hours, I’ll bet. Knows all the good patches. We’ll get there, all in good time.”

Harley beat his hands upon his knees in his agitation.

“Oh, this is hell!” he muttered. “Just plain hell!”

Roy nodded in agreement.

The red glow in the sky was brighter now, two distinct clouds of angry colour, the more distant showing where Napier burned more fiercely than Hastings. The colour flickered like an aurora, its dull red flaming to brilliant orange, then fading almost completely, only to flame again as the morning breeze fanned the conflagration.

It was a wonderful spectacle for pleasure-seekers, and a living horror for the stunned inhabitants of the stricken towns, and for those who rushed to their relief.

In the slow dawn telegraph poles leaned at ​grotesque angles or lay prostrate beside the uncertain road. On the left, the travellers discerned a large isolated building partially collapsed. Broken masonry and up-jutting, ragged timber; roofs which sprawled upon, the ground or straddled the walls which had supported them; goods trucks, on a private siding, half-buried in debris which had fallen from the sheds beside them, combined to make a picture of utter desolation. It gave the impression that destruction had come from above instead of from the earth.

The railway track, which here ran beside the road, was twisted and useless. Weird bends and waves in the rails defied man’s most ingenious locomotive to negotiate them. A railway bridge was in a dangerous state of collapse.

The ominous clouds ahead changed slowly from red to black, from black to grey, as the sun came up. Rolling grey billows which rose heavily and spread like a pall over the burning towns. The air was charged with choking dust, an eerie fog which veiled the terrible brown gashes in the distant hills.

The car moved ever more slowly now—riding uneasily over a road which had become dangerous,—a single link in a chain which jerked and rattled northwards, swept by slowly drifting banks of fog and fouled with dust and smoke.

Ever more frequent were the southward-bound vehicles; and when the light had fairly come they formed a procession almost as continuous as that which proceeded north. Refugees fleeing from the place of death in fear; tourists, thankful for their preservation, moving to the next town in their itinerary days ahead of their schedule; commercial travellers abroad at an unearthly hour in the course of duty; crippled humans, making their way in agony to the nearest hospital.

Also, were many afoot. Men pushing wheelbarrows laden with household goods; women pushing perambulators in which delighted children laughed. ​Men, women and children. Whole families walking southward.

Many of these latter would not go far afield as yet. The fear would die in their hearts to-morrow, as the earth remained comparatively still, and they would return to their homes with shame-faced smiles for their neighbours; but, at this moment of panic they made such a picture as did Belgian refugees fleeing before the German invasion.

This, however, was but momentary panic on the part of the few. The vast majority in the stricken towns had risen to the emergency, and now laboured without rest to succour those buried in the ruins. These were the weak—these wanderers—or those whose maternal instincts encompassed only their own brood.

“Looks like another war,” remarked Roy, voicing the thoughts of many.

“Dear me! Dear me!” breathed the elderly man.

The women and Harley stared out of the windows, fascinated, horrified, silent.