In places
one can see passages a hundred feet deep.
"The fire swept this Mongolian quarter clean. It left no shred of the
painted wooden fabric. It ate down to the bare ground, and this lies
stark, for the breezes have taken away the light ashes. Joss houses
and mission schools, groceries and opium dens, gambling resorts and
theatres, all of them went. These buildings blazed up like tissue paper.
"From this place I saw hundreds of crazed yellow men flee. In their arms
they bore opium pipes, money bags, silks and children. Beside them ran
the trousered women and some hobbled painfully. These were the men and
women of the surface. Far beneath the street levels in those cellars and
passageways were other lives. Women, who never saw the day from their
darkened prisons, and their blinking jailors were caught and eaten by
the flames."
Devastation spread widely on all sides, ruining the homes of the rich as
well as of the poor, of Americans as well as of Europeans and Asiatics,
the marts of trade, the haunts of pleasure, the realms of science and
art, the resorts of thousands of the gay population of the Golden State
metropolis. To attempt to tell the whole story of destruction and ruin
would be to describe all for which San Francisco stood. Science
suffered in the loss of the San Francisco Academy of Sciences, which was
destroyed with its invaluable contents. This building, erected fifteen
years ago at a cost of $500,000, was a seven-story building with a rich
collection of objects of science.
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