It was a flood, for the sea rushed forward in a gigantic tidal wave, fully a fathom in depth. It swept past pier and embankment into the lower streets, and receding, left boats and wreckage high and dry, but carried to a watery doom score upon score of human lives. Nearly two hundred men were drowned. It was a fire or rather a riot of fires, for the air was for a second filled with tongues of igneous vapour hiding themselves secretly within the lightning discharge of gas, only to burst out in gusts of sudden flame. Numberless buildings were presently ablaze. Soon there was naught to the northward but a roaring furnace. Above, the sky was crimson; below, a living crematorium--church and school, factory and home burned together in one fierce conflagration; and the brave firemen knew that there were men and women pinned beneath the wreckage, wounded past self-help. Frantic mothers heard the cries of little children, but in vain. Fathers desperately tore through burning brands, but often failed to save alive the captives of the flame. And so the last dread process went on,--earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And when the fires at last abated, the north end of the City of Halifax looked like some blackened hillside which a farmer had burned for fallow in the spring. But perhaps the most terrible of all the terrible accompaniments was the tornado-like gas-blast from the bursting ship. It wrought instant havoc everywhere. Trees were torn from the ground. Poles were snapped like toothpicks. Trains were stopped dead. Cars were left in twisted masses. Pedestrians were thrown violently into the air, houses collapsed on all sides. Steamers were slammed against the docks. Then followed a veritable air-raid, when the sky rained iron fragments upon the helpless city. Like a meteoric shower of death, they fell piercing a thousand roofs, and with many a mighty splash bore down into the sea. Nor yet did this complete the tale of woes of this _Dies Irae_. Scarce was the catastrophe an hour old when the news was flashed around that a second explosion was approaching. It was the powder magazine in the Navy-yard, and the flames were perilously near. Through the crowded streets raced the heralds like prophets of wrath to come. "Flee!.... Flee!.... Get into the open ground" was the cry. Shops were abandoned unguarded, goods laid open on every side. No key was turned, no till was closed, but all instanter joined the precipitant throng, driven like animals before a prairie fire--yet this was not all; for "the plight of the aged, the sick, the infants, the bed-ridden, the cripples, the nursing mothers, the pregnant can not be described." It was like the flight from Vesuvius of which Pliny the Younger tells: