On the morning after, a dirty yellowish cloud rose from the mutilated stumps of the twin towers. It drifted east over City Hall Park and then picked up a wind and moved more quickly up Broadway. Its fine ash fell on the masked policemen, on a few lone pedestrians, on the FBI agents and on the National Guardsman in combat gear, who sat high on a Humvee at the corner of Walker St. The air smelled like scorched paint.

All the shops were closed below Canal St., except for the Korean deli at Leonard St., which had stayed open feeding hungry locals and cops. Now there was no bread left, no bagels — only coffee and cakes.

The rituals of morning were disrupted. Even the newspapers belonged to some northern part of the city, above Houston St., above 14th St. Down here, people lived for a second day under the dirty yellow cloud of fanaticism.

"If I have to die," said a cheerful Korean woman behind the register, "I'll die here."

The night before, power failed from Worth St. to beyond the World Trade Center. The streets that night were eerie, as if hurled by the explosion back into the 19th century, when so many of the buildings were erected.

All of Church St. was packed with 16-wheelers (I counted 14 of them), all pointed downtown, waiting to haul away the wreckage. Plows, backhoes, generator trucks were on their flanks. The lights cast long, unsteady shadows, filled with spectres.

At a little before 11, I saw three exhausted firemen cross Chambers St., walking north, their faces etched with a failure that was not a failure of the heart. Behind them, under mounds of steel, glass, plaster, carpeting, desks, beams and girders, lay more than 200 of their comrades. Men crushed by the acts of lunatics, men who died trying to save human life.

Looks Said More Than Words

The ash-smeared coats of these survivors wore their names: Healey, Moriarty, Heaney. The indomitable Irishry, as Yeats once said. But it seemed obscene to stop and ask them how they felt. The look in their eyes said more than any words.

Now, in the daylight, we looked down Church St. from Reade St. and just past the post office, saw the black spiky shards of the façade of the north tower. They filled a space in front of the Borders bookstore that had been empty 24 hours earlier, so they must have blown outwards in the horrific collapse of the tower. Smoke rose from the mound of rubble behind them and a giant crane hovered above the ruins, as if urging itself, above all, to do no harm. Two birds, tough New York pigeons, suddenly flew past St. Peter's on Barclay St., made a circle to the west in the grainy air, then raced back east.

A block away was West Broadway, with police cars from Duxbury, Mass., Whitpain, Mass., and Suffolk County parked at the curbs, and the men who drove them down among the rescuers. In the tiny triangular park where Hudson St. meets W. Broadway, the leaves of the shrubs were coated with dusty ash, the streets were white, the sidewalk covered with a litter of exploded rental agreements, memos, jottings on memo paper. Soldiers in camouflage uniforms controlled crowds and traffic. In the distance, firemen on ladders poured water into the smoldering rubble. Above them was the smoky open space where the twin towers used to be.

On Greenwich St., the Salvation Army Emergency and Disaster Unit offered coffee and water to rescuers. Now immense dump trucks, loaded with ripped, twisted metal turned into Chambers St., heading west, and on to a dump at 59th St. One held a mashed red car, and a fireman poured water into it to be sure it held no fire. The water hissed against crumpled metal. This is what London must have been like on mornings during the Blitz.

Invincible New York Will

From West St., we could see more firemen pouring water on the smoldering rubble, and more rising, billowing clouds, and exhausted men gasping for air. This on a street where I used to walk a dog who was more noble a creature than any of the bastards who caused this ruin.

From the bridge over the highway that leads to Stuyvesant High School, the view was filled with the evidence of invincible New York will. Downtown, among the cops, and firemen, and National Guardsmen, hundreds of trade unionists — ironworkers, welders, carpenters — were walking toward the ruins; big, tough men, ready to cut steel. They wore hardhats and orange vests. They carried the tools of their glorious trades, those trades that built this city with brains, and muscle, and craft. The men of the trade unions. They would try this morning to save the living. The building could come later.

Uptown from the Stuyvesant Bridge, there were trucks from Mazzochi Demolition, and trucks carrying huge portable lights, and backloaders, and police trucks: all waiting their call. Waiting to go to the ruins, to claw and pull at bent steel and then to haul it away. The trucks were all the way up the West Side Highway, as far as eyes could see.

The men who drove and manned those trucks knew that ahead of them, in the dark voids of the destroyed twin towers, human beings might still be alive. Might be hoping for one more day, one more hour, one more chance at living, at hugging the people they loved, at romping with kids and grandchildren, slaying time at ballgames and beaches. If those trapped men and women could only see this New York army at work, they would be filled with the adrenalin of hope.

In the lobby of Stuyvesant High School, where so many of the smartest of our young people absorb each day the lessons of our civilization, cots awaited the casualties. Doctors and nurses waited to ease pain and save human life. Medicine, bandages and unguents were ready. There was food here, and drink, and hearts much bigger than those doomed towers. But while I was there, not a single living casualty arrived.

And from the ruins, that yellow cloud, made of pain and death and religious zealotry, created by twisted minds and hardened hearts, kept rising over the city. The stench of it poisoned the air. Sirens wailed their terrible song. But that sinister cloud would not prevail. The world's God-sick party of death would not win. There on the ground, on the day after our worst calamity, were the toughest people anywhere on Earth. They would remove that smoke from our sky. And when it was gone, they would work, as they always do, for life itself. They would drink. They would sing. They would dance.