The carts lumbered along, however, indifferent to every danger, in their careless disorder.  Their drivers were half asleep, and things kept on dropping to the ground and being smashed to atoms.  Just near us the ropes stretched round one cart became loosened by the rocking and bumping occasioned by the vile road, and the contents, no longer held in place, began spilling to the ground.  As soon as he had seen this, the Russian soldier-driver became furious.  He would have had to do a lot of work to repack his load properly, so he soon thought of a shorter and easier way:  he began deliberately throwing overboard his overload!  Three beautiful porcelain vases of enormous size and priceless value suffered this fate; then some bulky pieces of jade carved in the form of curious animals.  C——­ tried to stop the man, but I only smiled grimly.  What did it matter?  In Prince Tuan’s Palace I had seen, a couple of days before, the incredible sight of thousands of pieces of porcelain and baskets full of wonderful objects de vertu smashed into ten thousand atoms by the soldiery who had first forced their way there.  They only wanted bullion.  Porcelain painted in all the colours of the rainbow, and worth anything on the European markets—­what did that mean to them!

The convoy at last bumped away, leaving merely a long trail of dust behind it and those fragments on the ground, and C——­ became silent and then left me suddenly.  Perhaps the idea had finally entered his respectable British head that we had become grotesque and out of date, and that we should retreat and make room for other men.  Nobody cares for anybody else.  Only a few hours before a reliable story had been going the rounds that some Indian infantry had opened fire on a Russian detachment in the country just beyond the Chinese city, pleading that it was a mistake.  How could it have been?  There is only one really sensible thing to do, and now it is too late to do that; to set fire to the whole city and then retreat, as Napoleon did from Moscow.  The road to the sea is too short and the winter too far off for any harm to come.

The first cables have at length come through in batches from Europe, by way of the field telegraphs, which are now working smoothly and well.  Everybody of importance is being transferred, but it is impossible to find out where they are all going.  All the Ministers now pretend that they had asked for transfers before the siege actually began, and that they will be heartily glad to go away and forget that such a horrible place as Peking exists.  Yet from the nervousness of those who have been told to report for orders in Europe, it cannot be all joy.

VI

THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT

August, 1900.

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