The next day I landed at Talcahuano, and afterwards rode to
Concepcion. Both towns presented the most awful yet interesting
spectacle I ever beheld. To a person who had formerly known them,
it possibly might have been still more impressive; for the ruins
were so mingled together, and the whole scene possessed so little
the air of a habitable place, that it was scarcely possible to
imagine its former condition. The earthquake commenced at half-past
eleven o'clock in the forenoon. If it had happened in the middle of
the night, the greater number of the inhabitants (which in this one
province amount to many thousands) must have perished, instead of
less than a hundred: as it was, the invariable practice of running
out of doors at the first trembling of the ground, alone saved
them. In Concepcion each house, or row of houses, stood by itself,
a heap or line of ruins; but in Talcahuano, owing to the great
wave, little more than one layer of bricks, tiles, and timber, with
here and there part of a wall left standing, could be
distinguished. From this circumstance Concepcion, although not so
completely desolated, was a more terrible, and if I may so call it,
picturesque sight.
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