When The

By LANCE MORROW

In the spring of 1872, the naturalist John Muir was asleep in a small cabin in the Yosemite Valley. "At half past two o'clock," he wrote later, "I was awakened by a tremendous earthquake . . . the strange thrilling motion could not be mistaken, and I ran out of my cabin, both glad and frightened, shouting, 'A noble earthquake! A noble earthquake!' feeling sure I was going to learn something."

It would be delightful to think that he actually uttered those words, looking for sermons in the shaking stones. In any case, Muir was alone in the moonlit mountains, and so he could indulge his charming 19th century awe. When the earth turned in its sleep, it crushed much landscape in the folds, but somehow the event could keep its innocence. When nature does something awful, after all, is it part of the electrical display of God the Father, or merely geography rearranging itself, obeying an impersonal agenda?

When the earth cracks open to dismantle a city, then metaphysical questions come boiling up. What would Muir learn? What does the cataclysm have to teach? That the earth retains its genius for the wild surprise? Or that some profound principle of disorder and annihilating wrath has been set loose in the world?

Of all natural disasters, the earthquake somehow is the most unnerving. It is the earth talking, after all, and so it speaks with a primal power. Earthquakes in Scripture mean that God has crumpled up the order of the world and hurled it down in disgust. "And the foundations of the world do shake," says Isaiah. "The earth is utterly broken down." Or, agnostically, earthquakes are a wandering, enigmatic fierceness, now and then breaching the surface like Moby Dick.

An earthquake rides on a principle of disintegration -- the disintegration not only of architecture and pavements and lives but also of the entire idea of order, of process and human control. "What can one believe quite safe," asked Seneca, "if the world itself is shaken, and its most solid parts totter to their fall . . . and the earth lose its chief characteristic, stability?" The familiar world goes rioting down to rubble. Reality comes to rest at a crazy angle.

The terror lies first in the surprise. An earthquake is hidden from one moment to the next, as the future is hidden, as God is hidden. The event does not announce itself as most other disasters do, as a hurricane does, or a flood, or even an erupting volcano, which is after all hard to miss as dangerous geography. A plague too arrives more slowly. That is no consolation, but at least the mind and nerves are prepared. The event proceeds in a logical continuum of developing bad news.

An earthquake is simply an unannounced convulsion. It is nature performing a Shakespearean tragedy that begins absurdly in the fifth act: after 15 seconds, Hamlet and the others lie dying, the stage is covered with blood and debris. For many years one may have lived on top of the San Andreas fault and made doomy jokes about it; it is like having a violent beast in the basement, knowing that one day it may burst up through the living-room floor. But there is no preparation for the moment. Only certain animals feel premonitory vibrations undetectable to humans. They grow skittish. Horses glare with a wild panicked eye.

Sometimes storms, even hurricanes, can be exhilarating. It is fun to stand on a beach during a histrionic blow. An earthquake is not that kind of thrill. The worst part may be the feeling of helplessness. There is no right thing to do just then, except perhaps to flee the building. There is no knowing where the earth will open next. The wild cracking follows no principle but the terrifyingly random. Denial ("this is not happening") competes with fascination.

A major earthquake lays waste the human sense of scale. When reporters write about earthquakes, they invariably say that cars and other large objects were "tossed around like toys." Architecture collapses upon itself. The human idea of proportion is outraged in the rifting and shearing.

So certainties vanish. The earth liquefies. It becomes as wild as surf. The solid is abruptly fluid. Normally, earth is the refuge, the stability, the foundation of things. The earth should be alive only to grow vegetables and flowers. Now the earth itself becomes a beast, all teeth and gashes and sudden topplings. Reality has turned molten and violent.

Sometimes when the earth cracks open, it produces good stories. In March 1933, Albert Einstein was visiting the Long Beach campus of the University of California. He and his host from the department of geology walked through the campus, intently discussing the motions of earthquakes. Suddenly they looked up in puzzlement to see people running out of campus buildings. Einstein and the other scientist had been so busy discussing seismology that they did not notice the earthquake occurring under their feet.

There may be something perversely cathartic about earthquakes. For some time mankind has been in the business of manufacturing its own disasters -- wars, acid rain and other pollutions, drugs, a globe aswarm with refugees. Perhaps it is a relief for a moment to be face to face with a disaster that man did not invent, a cataclysm that has at least a sort of innocence of origin in larger powers.

The survivors will proceed like Odysseus and his men, after one of their escapes: "And so we sailed on, aching in our hearts for the companions that we lost, but glad to be alive."