“Hold my skirt, Kat,” I tell her. “Don’t let go!”

Kat looks up at me with fear-filled eyes but obeys. We race to follow the policeman who is carrying Belinda.

We emerge onto the street and into an orange-gold world of smoke and ash. Above us, hundreds of firefly cinders from an approaching blaze we can’t yet see are alighting on the roof of the pavilion, which is already heartily aflame in several places. I can’t see the other fires—the air all around is a smoldering blanket obscuring everything but what is right in front of me—but I can smell them, feel them, taste them, hear them. Ashes swirl about the ruin of the city hall across the street like snow.

Automobiles and wagons and trucks, every kind of vehicle that can be pressed into service, has been. These are now being loaded with not just the wounded but the bodies of the dead from the pavilion. We are told we will be taking refuge at Golden Gate Park, two miles away. Belinda is placed in a laundry delivery truck along with several other female patients in various stages of ability and health. When Kat and I and the baby reach the back of the truck, we are told we will have to find our own way to the park—there is only room for the wounded and sick in the commandeered vehicles.

“Don’t leave me!” Belinda cries out as I hand the baby to a man helping the women get situated inside the truck. The man hands the infant to Belinda as she begs again for me not to leave her.

“We’ll find you at the park, I promise!” I call to her. The door is shut on Belinda and my last view of her is her shouting that she wants out of the truck.

Another man raps on the vehicle to alert the driver to get moving.

I can’t tell which direction is west; the sun is masked by smoke. I can only follow the trucks and autos and carriages, and the masses of people doing the same. No one is heading east to the ferries now. I hear someone ask why the fire brigades are not putting the fires out and someone else says they have been trying all morning to put them out but the earthquake broke all the water mains belowground. The firemen can access no water. It is nearly laughable that as I hear these words, we are marching west on a peninsula that is surrounded on three sides by the sea. There is water in every direction but one, but no way of getting it to the streets. Those who would put the fires out can do little more than watch them take what they want.

And then I hear a boom off in the distance, and then another. The fire has gotten hold of something explosive, I am thinking, but a man in a military uniform several yards away says the army is dynamiting buildings here and there to create firebreaks and hopefully starve the fire of its food.