A Crack in the Edge of the World Read Online Free Page B

entered immediately after the shaking.
    The only snag was that poor Professor McAdie somehow managed to misread his watch during all the confusion, and he wreathed himself in a magnificent maze of complications as he tried to explain the mistake. He wrote that the day before the earthquake,
    my error was “I minute slow” at noon by time-ball, or time signals received in Weather Bureau and which my watch has been compared for a number of years. The rate of my watch is 5 seconds loss per day; therefore the corrected time of my entry is 5h 13m 05s AM. This is not of course the beginning of the quake. I would say perhaps 6 or more seconds may have elapsed between the act of waking, realizing, and looking at the watch and making my entry. I remember distinctly getting the minute-hand’s position, previous to the most violent portion of the shock. The end of the shock I did not get exactly, as I was watching the second-hand, and the endcame several seconds before I fully took in that the motion had ceased. The second-hand was somewhere between 40 and 50 when I realized this. I lost the position of the second-hand because of difficulty in keeping my feet, somewhere around the 20-second mark.
    However, there is one uncertainty. I may have read my watch wrong. I have no reason to think I did; but I know from experiment such things are possible. I have the original entries untouched since the time they were made.
    The official report accepts that the unfortunate man did effect an error in making what was probably the most critical observation of his career—but, out of courtesy, adds that such a mistake would have been very easy to make. The one-minute error is, then, officially compensated for, and Alexander McAdie enters the lists as having, essentially, timed the Great San Francisco Earthquake as beginning at 5h 12m 05s, recorded that it became extremely severe at 5h 12m 25s, and noted that it tailed off into bearable oblivion at 5h 12m 50s. The whole event, in McAdie’s eyes, extended over little more than forty seconds—about half the time that Davidson had computed, from his observations that were made a little bit closer to town.
    NINE MILES ACROSS the Bay in Berkeley slept Grove Karl Gilbert, one of the lions of early American geology and a figure still revered today as one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century. He was in the closing years of his career when he arrived at the University of California—appointed ostensibly to investigate whether miners should be given permission to resume the environmentally harsh (and, for half a century, totally banned) hydraulic method of mining, in which incredibly powerful jets of water were played on an exposed rock face to unseat any minerals (gold especially) that might be lodged there. At twelve minutes past five on that Wednesday morning Gilbert was rudely awakened by a sudden fierce vibration. The floors creaked and swayed below him. The light fixture swung in an arc above him—its swing aligned, he noticed, along an imaginary north-south line onthe ceiling—and the water in a pitcher on the washstand splashed out on the container’s southern side. He, like everyone else, was briefly alarmed, but then that feeling was rapidly overtaken in his particular case by, of all things, pleasure. His account, no doubt written with an eye cocked to posterity, begins as if he had only recently devoured the best-known work by Jane Austen:
    It is the natural and legitimate ambition of a properly constituted geologist to see a glacier, witness an eruption and feel an earthquake. The glacier is always ready, awaiting his visit; the eruption has a course to run, and alacrity is always needed to catch its more important phases; but the earthquake, unheralded and brief, may elude him through his entire lifetime. It has been my fortune to experience only a single weak tremor, and I had, moreover, been tantalized by narrowly missing the great Inyo