Now Jimmy brought his ship down in an easy glide until he was not more than 200 feet above the flood. He flew back and forth over the town. Carl snapped pictures as they flew and Jimmy watched every feature of the scene before him. Now he could see many people looking out of the upper floors of their homes. He could trace the course of the river by the line of debris and wreckage. For the flood had gone tearing through the city, wrecking, smashing, demolishing everything in its pathway. Before it had been swept a vast mass of material, consisting of outbuildings, uprooted trees, broken telephone poles, railroad ties, old boats, wooden bridges, sawlogs, pulp timber, porches, fences, boardwalks, demolished homes, and a thousand other objects that the rushing waters had wrenched loose or broken down or torn up. And all this mass of debris, jamming at the bottle neck, had backed the water up and submerged the town. Jimmy had read his map aright. As he flew, Jimmy made mental note of striking things he saw. Here was a house tilting at an unbelievable angle, its underpinning evidently washed away. Here were motor cars standing on their roofs, only their four wheels showing above the flood. Here were the remains of an iron bridge that must have weighed scores of tons. Yet the iron work was rolled into a great mass, like a ball of rope, and the whole thing rested on a smashed front porch of a home. The entire front of the house was caved in by the force of the blow struck by the iron. Here were railroad cars turned upside down. Through the centre of the town was a wide gap between rows of buildings. At first Jimmy did not catch the significance of this. He thought it was the river bed. Then something reminded him of the stream as he had seen it a few miles above Northend. There it was only a little river, a few rods wide. This breach in the centre of the town was of vast width. Suddenly Jimmy understood. Whole blocks of houses had been washed away. They must be jammed up with the other debris at the bottle neck below. He shuddered at the thought. The loss of life must have been appalling. Along either side of this wide pathway of death, the flood waters had left their marks. Debris of every conceivable sort had been washed up on either side of the furrow the flood had plowed through the town, and there a million odd things had lodged. Old boxes, chicken-coops, boards, timbers, door-steps, wooden gates, tin cans, and a multitude of other things had been forced in between houses or up on porches, or through first floor windows, until the scene was terrible beyond description. It was plain enough where the wall of water from the broken dam had gone surging through the town. Like a giant among pygmies, it had mowed down everything in its path.