484 A YEAR OF COSTA RICAN NATURAL HISTORY 



Sit once and could only crouch and cower between the foot 

 of the beds and the partition. The air was instantly filled 

 with plaster dust and mortar, while the crash of falling walls 

 and buildings was deafening. The shock seemed to last 

 ten minutes (though the real duration was sixteen seconds). 

 As soon as it had diminished enough for us to stand we made 

 for our window, over piles of debris and the furniture that 

 had been pushed out of place and found it possible to open 

 shutters and sashes and in another minute we were safely 

 in the street, having escaped without a scratch. How 

 miraculous this escape was we did not realize until later, 

 when we learned that the solid brick partition between our 

 room and that adjoining had fallen entirely into our room 

 across the very place where we had been sitting. The 

 other partition was wooden and there was a board ceiling, 

 so that we had, quite unconsciously, reached about the 

 safest place possible. 



We were among the first out, but the rest followed very 

 quickly. Everyone who had or could get to a street window 

 of course came out that way, but a number could not. The 

 Weldon family, forced to come through passages, were 

 slightly bruised by falling bricks. In a rear room, opening 

 by its door on the main patio and by its window on the 

 kitchen patio, were a young man, his wife and two-months- 

 old baby. This room, when examined by the engineers and 

 builders after the earthquakes of April 13, was said to have 

 the strongest walls in the town — walls which it was practi- 

 cally impossible for any earthquake to shake. But with the 

 first of this shock, the whole corner of this room with its two- 

 foot walls fell in upon the beds. The baby had been laid 

 down to sleep upon the bed, but as it was fretful the mother 

 picked it up again and just had it in her arms when the crash 

 came and the walls crushed the bed where the child was 

 lying a moment before. By the help of one of the servants 



