308 MIDDLEMISS : KANGRA EARTHQUAKE. 



ground, most buildings fell at once, but, as some think, at the second 

 shock. The recorded directions of shock are, as was to be expected, 

 extremely various ; whilst from some statements the shocks can only 

 be interpreted as a mass movement in a horizontal direction and back 

 again — not so much a fierce shaking as a drag of the ground in one 

 direction and then in another like the wash and back- wash of a water 

 wave on shore. The very heavy mortality in the bazars, barracks and 

 houses seems to imply the same thing, from the fact that only those 

 who were warned by the preliminary tremors and by the sound had 

 time to escape. All who waited for the shock itself were unable to get 

 away. Consider the statements — "the houses lurched forward with 

 violence and came down as if made of cards," and " in a moment, with 

 two fearful lurches, every house collapsed " and the still more laconic 

 "our houses fell down" and "the saheb had been thrown into a 

 corner and killed " (see p. 27). 



The absence in all this written evidence of any reference to shaking 

 or vibration, and the insistence on the instantaneous character of the 

 phenomenon confirms the conclusion drawn from the examination of the 

 ruins and hillsides, that the principal shock was so severe that the 

 complex of ridges and spurs were only able to take it up as one or two 

 vigorous and largely horizontal lashes (after the first tremors were 

 done) and that these horizontal lashes or rapid swayings were at once 

 damped on all slopes by free movement and spreading out of soil-cap 

 with surface fissures as already explained. 



From one eye-witness at Dharmsala (see p. 17), there is some 

 reason to believe that the necessarily slow translation of such surface 

 movements was actually observed, and that "the waves surged about 

 the variously curved slopes of the hills upsetting bazars and buildings 

 thereon, not simultaneously, but one after the other at intervals 

 appreciable to the eye. 1 



1 Mallet in his description of the great Neapolitan Earthquake found that the 

 rocking of towns perched on the summits and flanks of hills, especially the lower spurs 

 that skirt the great mountain range, greatly aggravated the natural effects of the shock, 



