'I Saw Bodies Falling Out -- Oh, God, Jumping, Falling'

Tower One collapsed atop the broken bodies. Then it buried the staging post where Curran prepared to enter the lobby for a staircase, heading up. "We all just ran," he said. "We couldn't do nothing but save ourselves. I got under a parked car with my respirator on. I was in total darkness for at least five minutes."

Dozens of Curran's comrades, some said hundreds, had already plunged inside the burning tower.

"You know what haunts me?" said Peter Genova, of GC Services Capital, who escaped down the fire stairs. "There had to be 200 firemen that passed us [going up] on our way down. God only knows how many were up there when it collapsed."

From miles away, on the gridlocked Long Island Expressway, the blackened towers resembled smoldering cigarettes. Here where their shadows once fell, millions of pages of paper covered block after city block, untold hundreds of thousands of man-hours of the most highly compensated labor in the world. "NATIONAL UNION INS. CO., $5,000.00 CSL AGGREGATE. . . ." "To whom it may concern, Please journal all securities and cash from. . . ." "In accordance with Section 5c of the Incentive Plan document. . . ."

Among the trove, singed but yet legible: architectural drawings for beautification and improvement of the Port Authority spaces around the towers.

The streets were thick with broken vehicles, husks of air conditioner and heating ducts. A water pitcher tilted, impossibly half full. A flashlight, glowing in the mud. A woman's pump, red under the dun-colored ash.

Huge lengths of five-inch fire hose pumped every drop of pressure from lower Manhattan. The strange sounds of running water, like a brook, filled city canyons.

By the thousands, emergency workers converged from Nassau and Westchester counties, northern New Jersey, the Bronx. Many carried hand tools, oddly poignant amid the apocalypse: a spade, an axe, a halligan -- the firefighter's medieval tool, like a cross between a crowbar and a pike.

They carried these implements to Vesey and West Streets, and stopped. There they found a building squashed as if by a flaming asteroid. Another, next to it, was horizontal, unidentifiable. Just past that, the impossible.

"That's it. That's the World Trade Center," said Dominic Bertucci, goggling at a much-too-small stump shrouded in smoke. Bertucci, from Bronx Engine Co. No. 50, stood at West Street and Murray at half past 12. Like every fire company in greater New York, No. 50 had gone to general quarters and an all-personnel recall. Emergency vehicles lined up four and six abreast on the West Side Highway, stretching for more than a mile, as far north as Houston Street. But thousands of men and women now sat idle, drinking Salvation Army grape juice and attempting to formulate a plan of attack.

"There's no way out here," came a crackling voice on Bertucci's radio. "We're trying to get out the other way. . . . Be advised we're going to have to try from the other side."

Across the street from 1 World Trade Center, the movie theater was mostly intact. It was playing "Ghost World."

Civilians did what they could think of, not all of it sensible. Peter Karmen, 44, assembled a fishing rod as fires burned around him a few blocks from the worst of the destruction. He pressed the tackle through an abandoned cashier's booth at the Washington Street Garage, attempting to hook the car keys he had left a few hours earlier. "I can't believe they left the door locked," he muttered.

A commodities trader, Karmen had been outside on a cigarette break when the first jetliner struck Tower One. Back upstairs, a block away, his picture window gave him a clear view of the second jet striking Tower Two. It banked east and then up from the south, and Karmen knew what to do when he saw the fireball.

He ran to the trading floor and tried to buy gold. "When it all hits the fan that's what everybody buys," he said. He watched the price shoot to $280 an ounce, but he seethed as panic trades impeded his order. Two minutes later, he said, the exchange shut down.

The only way back uptown was on foot. Just a few hundred yards from the epicenter, the Murray and River Terrace children's playground stood somehow untouched. Protected by an easterly wind, daisies grew tall in bright sunlight and the hippopotamus statues had no dust at all. Songbirds chirped in the bushes, living still.