But these are only little hints and warnings of what it can do.

When it is strong enough, it will rock down houses and churches into heaps of ruins, or, if it leaves them standing, crack them from top to bottom, so that they must be pulled down and rebuilt.
You saw those pictures of the ruins of Arica, about which our talk began; and from them you can guess well enough for yourself what a town looks like which has been ruined by an earthquake.

Of the misery and the horror which follow such a ruin I will not talk to you, nor darken your young spirit with sad thoughts which grown people must face, and ought to face.

But the strangeness of some of the tricks which the earthquake shocks play is hardly to be explained, even by scientific men.

Sometimes, it would seem, the force runs round, making the solid ground eddy, as water eddies in a brook.