"A wave from hell."
Matt Ketchum was mummering as he showed me the video he'd recorded on his phone of the terrifying moment when the tsunami hit his town a few days earlier.
Miyako, on Japan's north-eastern coast, became world renowned for footage of a jet-black wall of water hurling yachts over a coast-hugging highway.
The nautical debris was still evident when I arrived with my colleague Pol Reygaerts - including a huge cruiser jammed against the twin-columns of a flyover.
Equating the tsunami to a demonic force wasn't just Matt's reaction, an English teacher from Pennsylvania.
The obliteration of districts, if not entire towns, was described to me again and again as something quasi-evil.