The Stone Raft by José Saramago

These were also the days of the third exodus. The first, which was fully reported at the appropriate moment, was of the foreign tourists who fled in terror from what then, how time passes, still seemed no more than the possible danger that a crack would cleave the Pyrenees as far down as sea level, and what a pity this unexpected misfortune didn't stop there, just imagine how proud Europe would have felt to find itself endowed, as it were, with a geological canyon compared to which the one in Arizona would look no bigger than a tiny ditch. The second exodus was that of the rich and powerful when the fracture became irreparable, when the peninsula's course, although still slow, seemed to be gathering speed, showing, in a manner we believe definitive, the precariousness of established structures and ideas.

It then became clear how the social edifice, with all its complexity, is no more than a house of cards, solid only in appearance, we need only shake the table on which it stands and the house collapses. And the table in this instance, and for the first time in history, had moved by itself, dear God, let's save our precious possessions and precious lives and get away from here.