Los Angeles herald., 1906-07-22

nave you seen the fault?' a friend
asked me a couple Of weeks ago.
The fault? What Is that?" said l.
Earthquake assure" he answered
briefly Comes out Of the sea at Mus
sci Rock, four miles below the Cliff
house, then runs away down the coast"
had not seen It, but early next
morning took car from the Ferry to
Ocean View, and then cut across coun-
try three miles to the ocean.
You can't go to Mussel Rock today"
said a man whom passed on the way.
Though I have been back and forth
once a week for fourteen years I could
hardly find my way this morning. The
whole face Of the country is changed"
of course he exaggerated; yet, COM
ing out on the beach I found his state
ment had a solid foundation in fact
Though at this point the fault passed a
full mile out to sea, the sand cliffs,
seven or eight hundred feet in height
were torn riven and rent all along their
front Where dark chapparal had
clothed gentle slopes, vertical surfaces
now showed yellow as a gangrened
wound, purple streaked where the fric-
tion of sliding masses had actually
burned the clay In one place big
slice had fallen over, forming minia-
ture range with a valley a hundred
yards wide between 1t and the parent
cliff. At another the slide had gone so
far out into the ocean that one might
walk, drSshod, beyond the end of Mus
sci Rock, which projects $50 yards to
sea.
Along the face Of the cliff. some 400
feet above the beach, a right of way
had been excavated for the Ocean Shore
Electric road. OF this there remained
only odd bits Buried at some points
under enormous slides, at others 1t was
shorn away and tossed into the ocean.
Half way up one side the steel der
rick Of a steam shovel projected. Four
men were digging it out-one of whom
was actually on the shovel-when the
quake sloughed off both it and the right
of way.
Half a mile or so from the buried
shovel 1 crossed the line of the fault.
Coming out of the Pacific ocean in the
vicinity of Point Arena. 120 miles north
of San Francisco, it runs south along
the coast for 225 miles to San Juan.
There it fades from view, yet pursues
its course, doubtless, many other hun
dreds of miles beneath the California
desert. OF it's kind it is the most stu
pendous in history, exceeding by four
times the length Of the fault in the
great Japanese earthquake of 1881.
Sometimes wide crevaSSe, sometimes
a sunken road between parallel assures,
again bumped into a line of torn brown
sod, it plows through green valleys,
celaVeS forests, splits mountains-all
with a sublime contempt of topography
and inpressing one with a sense of the
energy behind, of blind
force, of power immuta BILE and abso-
lutely indiffernt to human hopes and
fears.
At the head of Spring valley it ap-
peared as a fissure, black and irregular
the road. On the morning
of the quake one might, suppose, have
a stone down to where, miles
below. the earths ponderous machinery
creaked and groaned; and though the
sides had now caved and crumbled, it
still yawned with sinister suggestive
ness. Stepping down, 1 had an uncom-
Portable feeling that the black walls
might close in like a door on a fly. or
open and let me through. 1t was i'm
pressive. No man can gaze on this, the
visible cause of San Francisco's disas-
ter, without a secret feeling of ave. nor
can he refrain from speculation as to
the mighty causes which produced this
great effect-causes which hark back to
the very beginning of geological time.
On the Pacific coast the oldest rocks
are limestones and quartzites. Ages
ago these were elevated above the sea,
were extensively eroded by stream and
wave action, and were then submerged
and covered by thousands of feet of
sediments which formed the Francis
can or Golden Gate series. This depo-
sition was ended by a second upward
Raised high above sea level
the series was folded, creased and
Is broken across the
strata. Remaining above sufficiently
long to be eroded, it sank again, to be
covered by 5000 feet of sediments of the
Cretaceous and Eocene periods. Ele-
waited for the third time, the series was
and faulted into a well de-
fined mountain range, and sank once
more in Pliocene times. though this
time not completely submerged. Along
the California coast was deposited the
Merced series, beneath which is found
a forest of pines indistinguishable from
those now growing at Monterey, and
which proves the rapidity of the sub
Raised for the last time,
the series was tilted at angles as high
as seventy-five degreet, and dslocated