When Jeronimo reached the gate and managed to crawl to the top of a hill just outside the city, he collapsed unconscious.

He may have lain there for a good quarter hour or so, in the deepest sleep, when he finally reawakened, and with his back to the city, raised himself half-upright on the ground. Touching his brow and breast, not knowing what to make of his present state, he was seized by a boundless sense of rapture as a west wind wafting from the sea fanned the feeling of returning life, and his eye flitted every which way, taking in nature’s blossoming splendor around Santiago. But the wretched heaps of fallen humanity everywhere he looked tore at his heart; he could not fathom what had driven them all to this state, and it was only when he turned around and saw the city lying in ruins behind him that he remembered the terrible moments he had lived through. He bowed so low his brow touched the ground to thank God for his miraculous delivery; and forthwith, as if that one terrible impression that engraved itself in his mind’s eye had driven out all previous impressions, he cried for joy that dear life in all its brilliant emanations was still his to savor.

Whereupon, perceiving a ring on his finger, he suddenly remembered Josephe; and with her, his incarceration, the bell he had heard and the moments that preceded the prison’s collapse. A bottomless sadness once again filled his breast; he began to repent of his prayer, and the force that held sway above seemed abominable to him. He mingled with the crowds pouring out of the city gates, people primarily engaged in saving their possessions, and timidly dared inquire after the daughter of Asteron and if her execution had been carried out; but no one was able to give him a conclusive account. A woman, almost weighted all the way down to the ground with a colossal load of household implements and two children hanging from the scruff of her neck, said in passing, as though she’d witnessed it herself, that the girl had been beheaded. Jeronimo turned around; and since, considering the time elapsed, he could not himself doubt that the execution had taken place, he sat himself down in a lonely wood and yielded to the full extent of his pain. He wished that the destructive force of nature would once again erupt upon him. He could not fathom why he had escaped the fate that his miserable soul had sought in those awful moments, since death seemed to advance unbidden to his rescue from every direction. He firmly resolved not to budge from the spot, even if here and now the mighty oaks were to be uprooted and the treetops were to tumble down upon him. Whereupon, having cried his heart out, and hope having been rekindled amidst the hottest tears, he stood up and set out to traverse the surrounding terrain in every direction. He scoured every mountaintop on which people had assembled; on every path on which the flood of humanity still flowed he sought them out; his trembling foot carried him to wherever he saw a woman’s garment fluttering in the wind – yet beneath none of these garments did he find the beloved daughter of Asteron. The sun sank low in the sky, and with it his hope once again began to sink, as he clambered up to the edge of a cliff, and his gaze fell upon a wide valley in which but a handful of people could be seen. He passed in haste through the individual groups of people he found there, uncertain of what to do next, and was about to turn around again, when he suddenly spotted a young woman seated by a wellspring whose water ran down into the gorge, busily washing a child in its stream. And his heart leapt at this sight: he hastened in a fury down into the ravine and cried out: “Oh holy mother of God!” as he recognized Josephe, who, roused by the sound, meekly looked up. Saved by a heavenly miracle, with what boundless joy did these poor unfortunates fall into each other’s arms!

Josephe had been on her way to death, already very close to the place of execution, when the entire apparatus was suddenly smashed to pieces in the crashing collapse of buildings. Her first panic-stricken steps thereupon carried her toward the nearest gate; but she soon returned to her senses and turned around to head back to the cloister where her helpless little boy had been left behind. She found the entire cloister already in flames, and the abbess, who, in those moments that were to have been her last, had offered succor to the newborn, crying outside the gate for someone to help save the boy. Josephe staggered undaunted through the burst of smoke that blew toward her, into the building already collapsing all around her, and just as if all the angels in heaven stood guard over her she safely reemerged with him from the portal. She wanted to fall into the arms of the abbess, who had clasped her hands over her head in joy, when the saintly lady, together with almost all the other sisters, was killed in a most ignominious way by a falling gable. Josephe fell back in horror at the terrible sight; she hastened to press the abbess’ eyes shut and fled, altogether consumed with fright, to save from the teeth of death the precious boy that heaven had given back to her.

She had only taken a few steps when she encountered the crushed corpse of the archbishop that had just been dragged out of the rubble of the cathedral. The palace of the viceroy had been leveled, the court of law in which she had been condemned to death stood in flames, and at the site where her father’s house had been a lake now bubbled over, spewing a red hot steam. Josephe pulled herself together to keep going. She bravely strode with her precious booty from street to street, chasing the misery from her breast, and was already almost at the city gate when she spotted the ruins of the prison where Jeronimo had been held. At the sight of this she tottered, about to fall unconscious in a corner; but at that selfsame moment the collapse of another building behind her that had been damaged by the tremors drove her upright again; fortified by her fright, she kissed the child, wiped the tears from her eyes and staggered to the gate, blind to the horror that surrounded her on every side. Once she’d made it out into the open, she soon concluded that not every resident of a fallen building was necessarily killed in its collapse.

At the next crossroads she stopped dead in her tracks and waited to see if a certain someone, after little Philip the dearest to her in the world, might yet appear. But since that person did not turn up and the fleeing mass of humanity grew from moment to moment, she continued on her way, then turned again and waited; and shedding bitter tears, she slunk into a dark valley shaded by stone-pines to pray for his soul which she believed to be departed; and it was here in the valley that she found this beloved person, and so found bliss, as if it were the Valley of Eden.

All this she now told Jeronimo with great emotion, and once she’d finished speaking, handed him the boy to kiss. Jeronimo took him in his arms and hugged him with immeasurable fatherly love, and weeping over the unfamiliar little face, sealed his lips with unending kisses. Meanwhile, the loveliest night had fallen, a wondrously mild, scented night, so silvery and still as only a poet could have dreamed up.