The naked man may have been the same victim one of Hachiya's later visitors remembered noticing, or he may have been another:
There were so many burned [at a first-aid station] that the odor was like drying squid. They looked like boiled octopuses… I saw a man whose eye had been torn out by an injury, and there he stood with his eye resting in the palm of his hand. What made my blood run cold was that it looked like the eye was staring at me.
The people ran to the rivers to escape the firestorm; in the testimony of the survivors there is an entire subliterature of the rivers. A third-grade boy:
Men whose whole bodies were covered with blood, and women whose skin hung from them like a kimono, plunged shrieking into the river. All these become corpses and their bodies are carried by the current toward the sea.
A first-grade girl:
We were still in the river by evening and it got cold. No matter where you looked there was nothing but burned people all around.
A sixth-grade girl:
Bloated corpses were drifting in those seven formerly beautiful rivers; smashing cruelly into bits the childish pleasure of the little girl, the peculiar odor of burning human flesh rose everywhere in the Delta City, which had changed to a waste of scorched earth.
A young ship designer whose response to the bombing was to rush home immediately to Nagasaki:
I had to cross the river to reach the station. As I came to the river and went down the bank to the water, I found that the stream was filled with dead bodies. I started to cross by crawling over the corpses, on my hands and knees. As I got about a third of the way across, a dead body began to sink under my weight and I went into the water, wetting my burned skin. It pained severely. I could go no further, as there was a break in the bridge of corpses, so I turned back to the shore.
A third-grade boy:
I got terribly thirsty so I went to the river to drink. From upstream a great many black and burned corpses came floating down the river. I pushed them away and drank the water. At the margin of the river there were corpses lying all over the place.
A fifth-grade boy:
The river became not a stream of flowing water but rather a stream of drifting dead bodies. No matter how much I might exaggerate the stories of the burned people who died shrieking and of how the city of Hiroshima was burned to the ground, the facts would still be clearly more terrible.
Terrible was what a Hachiya patient found beyond the river:
There was a man, stone dead, sitting on his bicycle as it leaned against a bridge railing… You could tell that many had gone down to the river to get a drink of water and had died where they lay. I saw a few live people still in the water, knocking against the dead as they floated down the river. There must have been hundreds and thousands who fled to the river to escape the fire and then drowned.
The sight of the soldiers, though, was more dreadful than the dead people floating down the river. I came onto I don't know how many, burned from the hips up; and where the skin had peeled, their flesh was wet and mushy…
And they had no faces! Their eyes, noses and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted off. It was hard to tell front from back.
The suffering in the crowded private park of the Asano family was doubled when survivors faced death a second time, another Hachiya confidant saw:
Hundreds of people sought refuge in the Asano Sentei Park. They had refuge from the approaching flames for a little while, but gradually, the fire forced them nearer and nearer the river, until at length everyone was crowded onto the steep bank overlooking the river…
Even though the river is more than one hundred meters wide along the border of the park, balls of fire were being carried through the air from the opposite shore and soon the pine trees in the park were afire. The poor people faced a fiery death if they stayed in the park and a watery grave if they jumped in the river. I could hear shouting and crying, and in a few minutes they began to fall like toppling dominoes into the river. Hundreds upon hundreds jumped or were pushed in the river at this deep, treacherous point and most were drowned.
“Along the streetcar line circling the western border of the park,” adds Hachiya, “they found so many dead and wounded they could hardly walk.”
The setting of the sun brought no relief. A fourteen-year-old boy:
Night came and I could hear many voices crying and groaning with pain and begging for water. Someone cried, “Damn it! War tortures so many people who are innocent!” Another said, “I hurt! Give me water!” This person was so burned that we couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman.
The sky was red with flames. It was burning as if scorching heaven.
A fifth-grade girl:
Everybody in the shelter was crying out loud. Those voices… They aren't cries, they are moans that penetrate to the marrow of your bones and make your hair stand on end…
I do not know how many times I called begging that they would cut off my burned arms and legs.
A six-year-old boy:
If you think of Brother's body divided into left and right halves, he was burned on the right side, and on the inside of the left side…
That night Brother's body swelled up terribly badly. He looked just like a bronze Buddha…
[At Danbara High School field hospital] every classroom… was full of dreadfully burned people who were lying about or getting up restlessly. They were all painted with mercurochrome and white salve and they looked like red devils and they were waving their arms around like ghosts and groaning and shrieking. Soldiers were dressing their burns.
The next morning, remembers a boy who was five years old at the time, “Hiroshima was all a wasted land.” The Jesuit, coming in from a suburb to aid his brothers, testifies to the extent of the destruction:
The bright day now reveals the frightful picture which last night's darkness had partly concealed. Where the city stood, everything as far as the eye could reach is a waste of ashes and ruin. Only several skeletons of buildings completely burned out in the interior remain. The banks of the rivers are covered with dead and wounded, and the rising waters have here and there covered some of the corpses. On the broad street in the Hakushima district,
