From the Tartar Wall we scanned the horizon with our glasses.  Not a soul afoot—­nothing.  Was all the world still asleep, tired from the night’s debauch, or was it merely the end of everything?  As time went on, and the silence around us was uninterrupted, we became more and more nervous.  In place of the storm of fire which had been raging for so many hours this unbroken calm was terrible; for far worse than all the tortures in the world is the one of a solitary silent confinement.

At one o’clock I could stand it no longer.  Getting leave to take out a skirmishing party, I called for volunteer and got six men and two Chinese scouts.  At half-past one we slid over the Eastern Su wang-fu barricades—­near where the messengers are sent from—­and scurried forward into the contested territory beyond.  Working cautiously in a long line, we beat the ground thoroughly; approached the enemy’s flanking barricades; peered over in some trepidation, and found the Chinese riflemen gone.  Every soul had fled.  Something had most certainly happened somewhere.  This quiet was becoming more and more eloquent....

We abandoned our cover, and boldly taking to the brick-littered street, climbed over fortifications which had shut us in for so long.  Not a sound or a living thing.  On the ground, however, there were many grim evidences of the struggle which had been so long proceeding.  Skulls picked clean by crows and dogs and the dead bodies of the scavenger-dogs themselves dotted the ground; in other places were pathetic wisps of pigtails half covered with rubbish, broken rifles, rusted swords, heaps of brass cartridges—­all proclaiming the bitterness with which the warfare had been waged in this small corner alone.  Eagerly gazing about us, we slowly pushed on, drinking in all these details with eager eyes.  How sweet it is to be an escaped prisoner even for a few short minutes!

In a quarter of an hour we had cleared the ground intervening between our defences and the long-abandoned Customs Street—­perhaps a couple of hundred yards; and peering about us, we at last jumped over the French barricade, where our first man had been shot dead two months ago.  Two months—­it might have been two years!  Still there was not a sound.  Nothing but acres of ruins.  Forward.

Splitting into two sections, we began working down Customs Street towards the Austrian Legation, tightly hugging the walls and expecting a surprise every moment.  Suddenly, as we were going along in this cautious manner, a tall, gaunt Chinaman started up only twenty feet from us, where he had been lying buried in the ruins.  Our rifles went up with a leap, and “Master,” cried the man, running towards me with outstretched arms, “master, save me; I am a carter of the foreign Legations, and have only just escaped.”  He pulled up his blue tunic, this strange apparition, and showed me underneath his scapula.  He was of Roman Catholic family; there was no time to investigate;