Awoke to hear the news of a great catastrophe off the islands of Japan. A tremendous earthquake shook the earth beneath the sea today, 80 miles off the East Coast of Honshu, near Sendai. According to the measurement scale devised by Mr Richter and Mr Gutenberg, its severity registered at a momentous 8.9. Such calamatous events cause physical damage over hundreds of miles.
This is thought to be the largest earthquake in Japan since the Hakuko Nankai earthquake on November 29, in the year 684 AD.
The most terrifying descriptions were however of the gigantic ocean wave that this shuddering of the earth created. Known as a Tsunami, a thirty foot high wall of death sped towards the hapless shores of Japan at a speed exceeding 400 miles per hour. Ships, trains, automobiles and houses were swept up and dragged into the interior, shattering to matchsticks any obstacle in the path of this Brobdingnagian amalgam of water and debris.
Left behind was a scene of apocalyptic destruction, where the fiery glow of incandescent buildings evoked the very pits of hell. The churning waters off the coast had at one point coalesced into a deadly giant vortex, hundreds of feet across, where a lone vessel was striving to escape the hungry maw at the centre of the whirlpool.
With dawn breaking above the home of the great Mt Fuji, the human tragedy of lives lost was gradually unfolding.
Most surreal was the contrast to the calm environs in our county, where we went about our business, met friends, laughed, loved and toiled at our labours, to be reminded at intervals by the unfolding dark events on the opposite side of the globe, by the reports on the radiograms, televisions and world wide web.
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