The night was bitter cold. Turks had turned in. Only a few lovers and elderly insomniacs were awake to hear the strange restlessness of animals. Dogs sat up and howled, cattle pawed in their stalls, fowls flapped their wings.
Turks who slept began to dream. Those who were awake suddenly felt vague fears.
The nerves of every living thing in Anatolia vibrated like taut catgut to the first, subaudible, microseismic music of an impending earthquake. The slow vibration became a horrible hum, and grew, like the sound of approaching bombers. Then the shock hit.
Man knows no terror like that which an earthquake excites in him. After the first rude awakening to a confused sensation of being thrown by a horse or buffeted by an unbeliever, each frightened Turk thought something deadly was happening to himself alone. If he was not killed in his bed before he could command his muscles—as thousands were, by the piles of stones and dirt placed on the roofs of Turkish houses to insulate them for winter —he next wanted desperately to escape his shaking surroundings and get outdoors, thinking to find stability there. But if he gained the street, he found everything he usually depended on gone awry: ground no longer solid, walls no longer perpendicular, trees no longer inanimate.
Telephone wires writhed. Mosques—till now the utmost in dependability—had jiggling minarets, and their domes wobbled. All around people shrieked, or stupidly asked what was happening. Animals stampeded. Human legs grew weak, but when people fell in the snow, they crawled and slithered in a desperate struggle to get to open fields. All around the white ground seemed liquid and rough as a choppy sea.
Like a cosmic dentist’s drill suddenly withdrawn, the quake stopped. Turks scrambled to their still-trembling feet. Some returned to what was left of their homes to stare or scrabble for loved ones. Those who remembered the repetitious earthquake of April 1938 stayed in the fields. Others prostrated themselves.before their prostrate mosques, calling on Allah. Hardly had they thanked their God for sparing them when a new shock came. Between two and five that morning the earth quaked four terrible times. When it was all over:
> In an area of 60,000 square miles, especially in Sivas, Erzincan and Samsun provinces, some 20,000 Turks lay dead, and 50,000 more were hurt. Many of the injured, pinned under wreckage, died.
> Hundreds of thousands were homeless. They huddled under tents or in temporary shacks in the snow-covered fields, or in the ruins of their homes, shivering with terror and with cold. The stricken area (same latitude as New York City) suffered its worst cold snap of the winter, with temperatures as low as 22° below zero.
> Communications were badly disrupted, slowing rescue work by the Army, volunteers, and Red Crescent (Turkish Red Cross). Bridges, rails, highways were either cut by the quake or blocked with snow and ice.
> In the Aegean reaches of Turkey, floods caused by misdirected streams capped the climax. Fourteen towns in the Karacabey Valley were inundated, motorists were drowned, residents took to their roofs.
When Mother Earth’s skin creeps, it usually creeps all over. Observatories all over the world reported that their seismographs had kicked up. In the California coast range, an earthquake woke sleepers. In South Africa’s rich Rand, 25 tremors sent natives running for the countryside. Bolsena, near Rome, felt four shocks, and Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras all reported quakes.
This activity all along the earth’s restless quake zone, and Istanbul Observatory’s announcement that the Turkish epicentre was 16 miles underground, led earthquake experts to warn that there would probably be further shocks, perhaps for as long as six months. There are many faults under Turkey, and seismologists predicted it would take some time for a new subterranean balance to be achieved.
The scientists’ predictions were only a few hours old when they were horribly fulfilled. New shocks, no less terrifying because expected, leveled 25 villages clustered around Amasya, and struck for the first time in western Turkey, near Smyrna. All told, last week’s quake was Turkey’s worst.*
In the midst of this bitterness, the British Government proudly announced it had agreed to buy all of Turkey’s surplus of figs and grapes—in order also to acquire her chromium, indispensable in making munitions. The Turks, bowed by the earth’s whims, could not help reflecting on the even greater foolishness of man. Some newspaperman in Ankara was reminded of the man in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 who, determined not to let nature’s lack of reason upset man’s good sense, shaved himself, carefully put studs in a clean shirt, dressed, packed a suitcase, and went out into the quaking city. He had walked half a block down Market Street before some one told him he had no pants on.
*But not the world’s. More lives were lost, more property damaged from quakes in Lisbon (1755), Calabria (1783), Sicily and Calabria (1908), Kansu Province, China (1920), Japan (1923), etc.
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