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enormous quake that ripped through the island of Formosa four weeks later, on March 17. This historic event, known variously as the Chiayi or the Meishan Earthquake, tore along a nine-mile fault in the west of the island, displacing the land on each side of the fault by six or seven feet horizontally and three or four feet vertically. At least 9,000 houses were destroyed, 2,000 islanders injured, and no fewer than 1,228 people killed. The Japanese, who ten years before had taken control of the island from China, organized a formidable rescue operation; but the fact remains that this was one of the largest and most terrifying quakes to have struck Taiwan for many years, and for some weeks following the disaster the situation overwhelmed all efforts to contain it.
    And then Vesuvius erupted. For ten terrifying days, beginning with a cannonade of rocks that was hurled 40,000 feet into the air above Naples on April 6, the only volcano on the European mainland underwent its most severe eruption for 300 years; some vulcanologists at the time said it may even have been greater in drama and strength than the legendary eruption of A.D . 79, when Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed by rivers of gas and glowing ashes.
    In 1906 just 150 people are thought to have died. The villages of Bosco Trecase, San Giuseppe, Ottajano (the destruction of which, said a newspaper of the time, “appalled the civilized world”), Poggiomarino, and Somma were all covered in several feet of ash, and some of them had to be hastily abandoned. When the market in the town of Oliveto collapsed under the weight of hundreds of tons of eruptive material, scores of shoppers were trapped inside, with dozens killed. Moreover, the very shape of Vesuvius was drastically changed by the explosions. The summit crater’s edges were shaved to an almost perfect horizontality—the shape the mountain has to this day, in fact. Beforehandit had been ragged and untidy—with cliffs more than 1,000 feet high around the steaming, smoking, and seemingly bottomless crater itself.
    It was not until April 16 that the explosions subsided and the eruptions stilled. The seismometers that had been measuring this extraordinary and, in terms of its power, nearly unprecedented display fell silent later that night. After ten days of malevolent unpredictability, the needles on the instruments that were monitoring matters in southern Italy all suddenly ceased their vibrating, at last. This was the beginning of the week, a Monday, and, with the damping down of Vesuvius, there seemed some small reason to suppose that the worst might be past. To more than a few on that evening there was, no doubt, a sense of relief—a sense that perhaps the world had now done its worst, and that it would lapse into a steady quiet once again, reverting to that blessed state in which the rocks stay where they are, the earth calms itself, and peace returns.
    That night was quiet. All of the succeeding Tuesday passed without incident. The world and its wife slept peacefully in their beds through much of Tuesday night.
    But on the Wednesday morning everything would suddenly change. The surface of the earth was to be ripped apart yet again—and in an instant it became abundantly clear that there would be no time for relief, relaxation, or reflection. Another earthquake was to strike, and, in terms of lives lost and structures ruined, this would be the worst, by far.
    Half a world away from Italy, on the cool morning of 18 April of that same very bad year, seventy-seven days after the earthquake in the Pacific off Ecuador, which might have signaled to some that all was not well with this quarter of the world, the earth in San Francisco and in a score of places nearby suddenly went dramatically and terrifyingly berserk.
    And though it is specifically San Francisco’s tragedy that forms the core of this account, so far as 1906 was concerned there was yet more to come. Before the year was done