The gentleman to whom I have alluded, Don Tomas de la G----, describes the subterranean noise at Cua during the earthquake as something terrific, like the discharge of hundreds of cannon, while the earth rose simultaneously under his feet. There are two kinds of earthquakes--that of _trepidacion_, which comes directly from below, with an upward motion; the other, _de oscilacion_, where the earth sways to and fro like a pendulum, and which is generally less dangerous. Unfortunate Cua experienced both: the first shock was one vast upheaval, the whole town being uprooted from its foundations and every house uplifted and overturned, and before the bewildered population could realize what was happening they were buried beneath the ruins. The shock then changed into the oscillatory movement, and set all this mass of destruction to quivering as if it were the dire agony of some living creature. All was so sudden that few were saved by their own exertions, those who survived having either been dug out of the ruins afterward or cast forth by the counter-motion as the earth rocked to and fro in the second shock. It was as if the city had been lifted up _en masse_, and then thrown back with the foundations uppermost--upside down, in fact. Don Tomas de la G---- happened to be in the plaza in front of the church when the shock came: in the endeavor to steady himself he grasped a tree close by; the tree was uprooted, throwing him violently forward; then suddenly reversing its course in an exactly opposite direction, it flung him off to a great distance, bruising him severely. While clinging to the tree he beheld the church in front of him, a new and handsome edifice, literally lifted up bodily into the air and then overturned with an appalling crash, "not one stone left upon another." If this had occurred an hour or two previously, hundreds would have perished within the walls, for there had been religious services in the church until a late hour, it being the Friday before Holy Week, termed by Spanish Catholics _Viernes del Concilio_. Don Tomas de la G---- described the whole scene as something too terrible for the imagination to conceive. After the stupendous crash caused by the falling of the houses, for a few moments there ensued an awful silence: then, amid the impenetrable darkness caused by the cloud of dust from the fallen walls, which totally obscured the murky light of a clouded moon, there arose a cry of anguish from those without--a wail as of one great voice of stricken humanity; then the answering smothered groan of those buried beneath the ruins--a cry like nothing human, rising as it did from the very bowels of the earth.