A few minutes before midnight the sounds became more sullen, and beneath the general uproar another note, one of those in distress, began, as it were, like an undercurrent to this pandemonium.  The cause we had not long to seek, for presently flames began to shoot up, a sight we were by now well accustomed to, though not in this purely trading quarter of the city.  The fire, started with savage disregard in the very centre of the most densely populated street of the Chinese city, spread with terrible rapidity.  Soon both sides of Ch’ien Men great street, just on the other side of the Tartar Wall, were enveloped in raging flames, and a lurid light, growing ever brighter and brighter, turned the dark night into an unnatural day.

Between the incendiaries and ourselves the great Tartar Wall stood firm, but though this ancient defence against other barbarians was an effective protection for us, it could not long remain immune itself.  The lou, or square pagoda-like tower facing the Chinese city side, caught some of the thousands and tens of thousands of sparks flying skywards, and it was not long before the vast pile was burning as fiercely as the rest.  The great rafters of Burmese teak, brought by Mongol Khans six centuries before to Peking, were as dry as tinder with the dryness of ages; and thus almost before we had noted that the bottom of the tower was well alight the flames were shooting through the roof and out through the hundreds of little square windows which in olden days were lined by archers.  Higher and higher the flames leaped, until the top of the longest tongues of fire, pouring out through a funnel of brick, was hundreds of feet above the ground level.  Only Vereschagin could have done justice to this holocaust; I have never seen anything so barbarically splendid.

Meanwhile below this in the Chinese city all had become quiet, except for the increasing and growing roar of the all-devouring flames.  The Boxers, as if appalled by their own handiwork and the mournful sight of the capital in flames, had retreated into their haunts and had left the unfortunate townfolk to battle with this disaster as they could.  From the top of the wall, which I hastily climbed as soon as I obtained permission to leave my post, thousands and tens of thousands of figures could be seen moving hurriedly about laden with merchandise, which they were attempting to save.  Busy as ants, these wonderful Chinese traders were rescuing as much of their invested capital from the very embrace of the flames as they could at a moment when the Boxer patriots, menacing and killing them with sword and spears as san mao-tzu, or third-class barbarians who sold the cursed foreigners’ stuffs and products, had hardly disappeared.

Yet it seemed vain, indeed, to talk of salvage with half the city in flames, for other fires now began mysteriously in other places, which “lighted” the horizon. “Tout Pekin brule,” muttered a French sailor to me as I passed back to my post, and his careless remark made me think that this was the Commune and Sansculottism intermixed—­the ends of two centuries tumbled together—­because we foreigners had upset the equilibrium of the Far East with our importunities and our covetousness of the Yellow Man’s possessions....