A Water Earthquake 275 



submerged rocks extends diagonally across the channel from 

 the right bank, two-thirds of the way towards the newly 

 formed point, greatly adding to the danger and the fury of 

 the rapid. 



The area of land set in motion is about half a mile in 

 frontage by one mile in depth: a chasm filled with enor- 

 mous rock fragments separates the firm land at the rear 

 from the land that has slipped forward. The cause of 

 the slide appears to have been the washing out of the 

 earth beneath this hill of detritus at a point beneath 

 where it rested upon impermeable rock. Thus under- 

 mined, a subsidence took place, and the whole mass then 

 slid bodily forward in the direction of the river : arrived 

 at the solid bank, the land seems to have been forced 

 upward by the pressure from behind, as we see by the 

 position of the displaced farmhouses, and notably a stone 

 oil-mill, the walls of which now stand inclined inland at 

 an angle of thirty to forty degrees. The slide occurred 

 in the night of the twenty-third day of the eighth moon; 

 the occupants of the various farms scattered over the sur- 

 face were warned by ominous rumblings and crackings the 

 day before, and so had time to clear out : not so the inhabi- 

 tants of a valley just above, through which, on the same 

 south bank, flows an affluent of the Yang-tse called the Siao 

 Ho. Here a navigable river was entirely dammed across, 

 and the navigation now goes no farther than the foot of the 

 landslide ; it is here arrested by a wall two hundred feet 

 high, over which the river descends in a grand waterfall 

 from the lake that has formed behind. Sixty souls, the 

 population of a farmhouse on the bank, lie buried in the 

 dibris. But although the landslip produced no fatal injury 

 on land, it was otherwise on the water : several jimks. 



