Tequila Minsky, a New York-based photographer who is staying at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince — which was the model for the Haitian hotel in Graham Greene’s novel “The Comedians” — told my colleague Patrick Witty, a photo editor on the New York Times foreign desk, what she saw immediately after the earthquake. She had arrived at the hotel just two hours before the quake struck, shaking the walls of her room shook and knocking things off it.

She immediately went out and started taking pictures on the surrounding streets. The wall at the front of the hotel had fallen down and killed someone. A number of nearby buildings had collapsed, trapping people. A woman was crying and saying, “My uncle, my uncle.” A bank building was very badly damaged in the Rue Capois which runs along the side of the hotel. People were screaming. “It was general mayhem,” she said.

By 6:30, she said, it was dark and fires were burning downtown, near the shoreline.