About this eye of flame crowded those who had built it, and the roaring mass of red-hot timber and seething pitch represented the consummation of Chagford’s festivities on the night of Jubilee.  The flames, obedient to such light airs as were blowing, bent in unison with the black billows of smoke that wound above them.  Great, trembling tongues separated from the mass and soared upward, gleaming as they vanished; sparks and jets, streams and stars of light, shot from the pile to illuminate the rolling depths of the smoke cloud, to fret its curtain with spangles and jewels of gold atid ruby, to weave strange, lurid lights into the very fabric of its volume.  Far away, as the breezes drew them, fell a red glimmer of fire, where those charred fragments caught in the rush and hurled aloft, returned again to earth; and the whole incandescent structure, perched as it was upon the apex of Yes Tor, suggested at a brief distance a fiery top-knot of streaming flame on some vast and demoniac head thrust upward from the nether world.

Great splendour of light gleamed upon a ring of human beings.  Adventurous spirits leapt forth, fed the flames with faggots and furze and risked their hairy faces within the range of the bonfire’s scorching breath.  Alternate gleam and glow played fantastically upon the spectators, and, though for the most part they moved but little while their joy fire was at its height, the conflagration caused a sheer devil’s dance of impish light and shadow to race over every face and form in the assemblage.  The fantastic magician of the fire threw humps on to straight backs, flattened good round breasts, wrote wrinkles on smooth faces, turned eyes and lips into shining gems, made white teeth yellow, cast a grotesque spell of the unreal on young shapes, of the horrible upon old ones.  A sort of monkey coarseness crept into the red, upturned faces; their proportions were distorted, their delicacy destroyed.  Essential lines of figures were concealed by the inky shadows; unimportant features were thrown into a violent prominence; the clean fire impinged abruptly on a night of black shade, as sunrise on the moon.  There was no atmosphere.  Human noses poked weirdly out of nothing, human hands waved without arms, human heads moved without bodies, bodies bobbed along without legs.  The heart-beat and furnace roar of the fire was tremendous, but the shouts of men, the shriller laughter of women, and the screams and yells of children could be heard through it, together with the pistol-like explosion of sap turned to steam, and rending its way from green wood.  Other sounds also fretted the air, for a hundred yards distant—­in a hut-circle—­the Chagford drum-and-fife band lent its throb and squeak to the hour, and struggled amain to increase universal joy.  So the fire flourished, and the plutonian rock-mass of the tor arose, the centre of a scene itself plutonian.