During those minutes between the first and second collapse, it seemed oddly silent, although there was a constant shriek of sirens and the sky was full of throbbing helicopters, none of the people watching spoke. Neither did the workers, many of them now covered in the famous grey dirt, as they finally began to hurry passed us like water through rocks in a stream. Someone said the second building was tilting, but I was at the wrong angle to see it. What I saw was it begin to pancake, its spiky antenna hovering in the air as the floors crashed around it and then a big hideous cloud rolling down and out and then up. Eventually the antenna spike fell, and I realized I was weeping while others around me screamed. A very different visual, down at street level, as the sky filled with smoke, to what I would later watch, over and over, on my TV.