quantity of vegetable soil, and also of loose sands and clays, resting on steep
slopes, hill-tops and the sides of ravines, is a curious and important
phenomenon. It may be due in part to constant, slight earthquake shocks
facilitating the disintegration of rock; but, would also seem to indicate that the
country has been long exposed to gentle atmospheric action, and that its
elevation has been exceedingly slow and continuous.
During my stay at Rurúkan, my curiosity was satisfied by experiencing a
pretty sharp earthquake-shock. On the evening of June 29th, at a quarter after
eight, as I was sitting reading, the house began shaking with a very gentle, but
rapidly increasing motion. I sat still enjoying the novel sensation for some
seconds; but in less than half a minute it became strong enough to shake me in
my chair, and to make the house visibly rock about, and creak and crack as if it
would fall to pieces. Then began a cry throughout the village of "Tana goyang!
tana goyang!" (Earthquake! earthquake!) Everybody rushed out of their houses
—women screamed and children cried—and I thought it prudent to go out too.
On getting up, I found my head giddy and my steps unsteady, and could hardly
walk without falling. The shock continued about a minute, during which time I
felt as if I had been turned round and round, and was almost seasick. Going into
the house again, I found a lamp and a bottle of arrack upset. The tumbler which
formed the lamp had been thrown out of the saucer in which it had stood. The
shock appeared to be nearly vertical, rapid, vibratory, and jerking. It was
sufficient, I have no doubt, to have thrown down brick, chimneys, walls, and
church towers; but as the houses here are all low, and strongly framed of timber,
it is impossible for them to be much injured, except by a shock that would utterly
destroy a European city. The people told me it was ten years since they had had
a stronger shock than this, at which time many houses were thrown down and
some people killed.
At intervals of ten minutes to half an hour, slight shocks and tremors were felt,
sometimes strong enough to send us all out again. There was a strange mixture
of the terrible and the ludicrous in our situation. We might at any moment have a
much stronger shock, which would bring down the house over us, or—what I
feared more—cause a landslip, and send us down into the deep ravine on the
very edge of which the village is built; yet I could not help laughing each time
we ran out at a slight shock, and then in a few moments ran in again. The
sublime and the ridiculous were here literally but a step apart. On the one hand,
the most terrible and destructive of natural phenomena was in action around us
—the rocks, the mountains, the solid earth were trembling and convulsed, and
we were utterly impotent to guard against the danger that might at any moment