growling, carnivorous, drunk with whiskey from pillaged warehouses, drunk with hatred, drunk with lust for blood—­men, women, and children, in rags and tatters, dim ferocious intelligences with all the godlike blotted from their features and all the fiendlike stamped in, apes and tigers, anaemic consumptives and great hairy beasts of burden, wan faces from which vampire society had sucked the juice of life, bloated forms swollen with physical grossness and corruption, withered hags and death’s-heads bearded like patriarchs, festering youth and festering age, faces of fiends, crooked, twisted, misshapen monsters blasted with the ravages of disease and all the horrors of chronic innutrition—­the refuse and the scum of life, a raging, screaming, screeching, demoniacal horde.

And why not?  The people of the abyss had nothing to lose but the misery and pain of living.  And to gain?—­nothing, save one final, awful glut of vengeance.  And as I looked the thought came to me that in that rushing stream of human lava were men, comrades and heroes, whose mission had been to rouse the abysmal beast and to keep the enemy occupied in coping with it.

And now a strange thing happened to me.  A transformation came over me.  The fear of death, for myself and for others, left me.  I was strangely exalted, another being in another life.  Nothing mattered.  The Cause for this one time was lost, but the Cause would be here to-morrow, the same Cause, ever fresh and ever burning.  And thereafter, in the orgy of horror that raged through the succeeding hours, I was able to take a calm interest.  Death meant nothing, life meant nothing.  I was an interested spectator of events, and, sometimes swept on by the rush, was myself a curious participant.  For my mind had leaped to a star-cool altitude and grasped a passionless transvaluation of values.  Had it not done this, I know that I should have died.

Half a mile of the mob had swept by when we were discovered.  A woman in fantastic rags, with cheeks cavernously hollow and with narrow black eyes like burning gimlets, caught a glimpse of Hartman and me.  She let out a shrill shriek and bore in upon us.  A section of the mob tore itself loose and surged in after her.  I can see her now, as I write these lines, a leap in advance, her gray hair flying in thin tangled strings, the blood dripping down her forehead from some wound in the scalp, in her right hand a hatchet, her left hand, lean and wrinkled, a yellow talon, gripping the air convulsively.  Hartman sprang in front of me.  This was no time for explanations.  We were well dressed, and that was enough.  His fist shot out, striking the woman between her burning eyes.  The impact of the blow drove her backward, but she struck the wall of her on-coming fellows and bounced forward again, dazed and helpless, the brandished hatchet falling feebly on Hartman’s shoulder.