The clear September morning brought with it another simple clarity. Belfast's loyalist streets awoke to the debris and destruction left from the havoc its people brought on themselves.
It looked like the darkest days of Drumcree in the 90s, the hunger strikes in the 80s, the unbridled violence of the 70s or the kindling of the Troubles in the 60s.
Yet the backdrop to the rubble, the embers and the glass splinters glinting in the sunlight was not the grimy, impoverished streets of two-up, two-downs from Belfast's recent decades.
This destruction was set against the lines of neat, modern homes with their hanging baskets and cars parked outside. Belfast's new makeover was disfigured by the old disease.
Unlike those black-and-white memories from the bad old days, this devastation had not flowed from one "side" laying siege to the other. This was a community that had attacked itself yet seemed blind to the results of its own actions.
Along the Shankill Road in west Belfast, shopkeepers counted the cost of the damage and denounced everyone other than the hordes who had inflicted it.
In north Belfast, MP Nigel Dodds discovered his Newtownabbey office had been engulfed in the arson attack aimed at the business next door.
In east Belfast, side streets off the Albertbridge Road smouldered amid the traffic chaos caused by the levelling of every road sign, traffic light and bus stop for hundreds of metres.
Rioters had commandeered a mechanical digger, gouged out a cashpoint machine from a filling station and demolished everything vertical along the length of the road.
By mid-morning, the joke about getting money from the hole-in-the-wall was doing the rounds.
Locals told reporters from the BBC and UTV that the Parades Commission was to blame. Others said they couldn't support the PSNI against the rioters because the word "Royal" had been stripped from its title. Their lines were like something written for a ninth-rate farce.
It was as if there were two Belfasts - but this time not a green version with an orange counterpart. This new division was between those who found this smouldering destruction explicable, if not justifiable, and the rest who could do little more than shake their heads.
British ministers demanded to know where the unionist leaders stood. Did they condemn the violence and back the police? It was a Yes or No question, but the very length and complexity of some of the answers told its own story.