Of a sudden it came.  A shudder, a tremor, a quivering shock ran, for hundreds of miles simultaneously, through Venezuela.  A groan, swelling thunderously and threateningly into a hollow roar, burst from the tortured earth, and swallowed up in its convulsive rumbling the shrieks of an entire nation suddenly inwrapt in the shadow and agony of death.  For a moment,—­as if a supernatural hand were painfully lifting it from its inmost core,—­the earth rocked and heaved through all Venezuela; and then, almost before the awful exclamation, El temblor! had time to burst from the lips of that stricken nation, it bounded from the bonds that held it, and in a moment was quaking, heaving, sliding, surging, rolling, in awful semblance to the sea.  Great gulfs opened and closed their jaws, swallowing up and again belching forth dwellings, churches, human beings, overtaken by instantaneous destruction.

A flash and a roar passed through the earth, and a jagged chasm followed in its track, creating others in its rapid clash and close.  Whole cities shivered, tottered, reeled, and fell in spreading heaps of undistinguishable ruin.  In one minute and fifteen seconds, twenty thousand human beings perished in Venezuela; and then the Earthquake of Caracas ceased.

It was after four o’clock in the afternoon when the first subterranean shock was felt; and long before five the agonized earth was still.  Long before five, the stupefied survivors stood slowly recovering their faculties of speech and motion.  Long before five, a piteous wail ascended to heaven from fathers and husbands and wives and mothers, desolately mourning the dead in the streets of Caracas, La Guayra, Merida, San Felipe, and Valencia.  In this manner the Holy Thursday of 1812 drew toward its close.  But the physical disasters consequent upon the great earthquake were of insignificant import as compared with its moral effect.  Colonist and Spaniard had shared alike in suffering and death during those dreadful moments; but the superstitious population readily accepted the interpretation which an eager priesthood placed upon the event, and bowed in the belief that they had suffered the infliction in punishment of their rebellion against the King.  Nine-tenths of the clergy and monastic brotherhood inwardly hated and feared the Revolution, and their practised tongues drew terrible auguries for rebellious Venezuela from the recent throes and upheaval of the earth.  Preachers solemnly proclaimed the fact, that this, without doubt, was a catastrophe akin to the memorable convulsion which once had swallowed up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, for mutiny against the Lord; and the proximate wrath of God could be appeased only by a retrogression into his chosen paths.  The people listened to the fathers, and obeyed trembling.  Miranda, who had struggled against and overcome the material power of his enemies, was impotent when confronted by spiritual terrors; and after a few languid combats, his troops deserted, leaving Monteverde to triumph once more in the assertion of Spanish authority over every province of Venezuela.  His headquarters were established at Caracas, and there, as well as elsewhere, his troops revelled in the perfidious torture and execution of their capitulated foes.  During nearly two years, Monteverde reigned in Venezuela.