Description of the Destruction Done It was a sad company of eleven hundred people, almost beyond the stage of trying to put a brave face on matters, that the R.M.S. Empress of Canada brought to Shanghai on Saturday morning.
The occasion was the first opportunity for getting full and accurate details of the great disaster, but it was a heartrending task gathering the particulars. The majority of the refugees were women, many with children clinging to their skirts, and there were very few who could' stand the strain of answering half-a-dozen questions which would recall happenings they would rather forget. Even the men preferred to talk of other subjects. All were a distressful looking company, clad for the most part in ill-fitting oddments hastily gathered from charitable people in Kobe.
There had been. several slight earthquake shocks prior to the fateful first of September, but nothing out of the ordinary for Japan and there had been nothing to arouse anxiety. A minute before noon on Saturday a week ago, just as people were prepar-, ing to leave their offices, there came a slight earth tremor, but with.the difference that it did not stop, but continued for quite five minutes, with a lateral motion developing into a swirl and ever increasing in force. Then, of a sudden, in Yokohama practically every building crumpled up, the new Telephone Building, a modern steel_ frame erection which is not quite completed, being about the only one that did not fall. It is believed that it. was because most of the Foreigners then were in fairly substantial office buildings that so very few of them were killed, for they had a measure of protection, whereas people in the streets were
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.