Riding quickly, at last we reached the famous cathedral, with great trenches and earthworks surrounding it, and the torn and battered buildings showing how bitter the struggle had been.  To our siege-taught eyes a single look explained the nature of the defence, and the lines which had been naturally formed.  It was written as plain as on a map.  The priests and their allies had now hauled the enemy’s abandoned guns to the cathedral entrances and the spires were now crowned with garlands of flags of all nations.  But that was all.  There was no one to be seen.  Everybody was away, out minding the new business—­that of making good the damage done by levying contributions on the city at large.  It was all dead quiet, silent like some deserted graveyard.  The sailors and the priests and their converts, remembering that Heaven helps those who help themselves, had sallied out and were reprovisioning themselves and making good their losses.  Indeed, the only men we could find were some converts engaged in stacking up silver shoes, or sycee, in a secluded quadrangle.  These had become the property of the mission by the divine right of capture; there seemed at the moment nothing strange about it.

This silent cathedral, with its vast grounds and its deserted quadrangles torn up by the savage conflict, became to us curiously oppressive—­almost ghostlike in the bright sunshine.  It seemed absurd to imagine that forty or fifty rifle-armed sailors, a band of priests and many thousands of converts had been ringed in here by fire and smoke for weeks, and had lost dozens and hundreds at a time through mine explosions.  It seemed, also, equally absurd that the twenty or thirty thousand men who had poured into Peking had already become so quickly lost in the expanses of the city.  Where were they all?...

My mad companion had tired, too, of looking, and wanted again to rush off and discover some signs of life.  He wanted, above all, to see the place where the first companies of the French infantry had suddenly come on a mixed crowd of Boxers, soldiers and townspeople fleeing in panic all mixed together, and had mown them down with mitrailleuses.  There was a cul-de-sac, which was horrible, it was reported.  The machine-guns had played for ten or fifteen minutes in that death-trap without stopping a second until nothing had moved.  The incident was only a day or two old, yet everyone had heard of it.  People exclaimed that this was going too far in the matter of vengeance.  But everything had been allowed to go too far....

We rode out at a canter, and wondered more and more as we rode at the solitude, where so few hours before there had been such a deafening roar.  We plunged straight into the maze of narrow streets, and then suddenly, before we were aware of it, our mounts were swerving and snorting in mad terror!  For corpses dotted the ground in ugly blotches, the corpses of men who had met death in a dozen different ways.  Lying in exhausted attitudes, they covered the roadway as if they had been merely tired to death.  It was awful, and I began to have a terrible detestation for these Asiatic faces, which, because they are dead, become such a hideous green-yellow-white, and whose bodies seem to shrivel to nothing in their limp blue suitings.  Such dead are an insult to the living.