“Fool, come out and save yourself!” shouted Turnbull.

“No, by Heaven! that is not the way,” cried Evan, suddenly.  “Father,” he shouted, “come out and save us all!”

The fire, though it had dropped in one or two places, was, upon the whole, higher and more unconquerable than ever.  Separate tall flames shot up and spread out above them like the fiery cloisters of some infernal cathedral, or like a grove of red tropical trees in the garden of the devil.  Higher yet in the purple hollow of the night the topmost flames leapt again and again fruitlessly at the stars, like golden dragons chained but struggling.  The towers and domes of the oppressive smoke seemed high and far enough to drown distant planets in a London fog.  But if we exhausted all frantic similes for that frantic scene, the main impression about the fire would still be its ranked upstanding rigidity and a sort of roaring stillness.  It was literally a wall of fire.

“Father,” cried MacIan, once more, “come out of it and save us all!” Turnbull was staring at him as he cried.

The tall and steady forest of fire must have been already a portent visible to the whole circle of land and sea.  The red flush of it lit up the long sides of white ships far out in the German Ocean, and picked out like piercing rubies the windows in the villages on the distant heights.  If any villagers or sailors were looking towards it they must have seen a strange sight as MacIan cried out for the third time.

That forest of fire wavered, and was cloven in the centre; and then the whole of one half of it leaned one way as a cornfield leans all one way under the load of the wind.  Indeed, it looked as if a great wind had sprung up and driven the great fire aslant.  Its smoke was no longer sent up to choke the stars, but was trailed and dragged across county after county like one dreadful banner of defeat.

But it was not the wind; or, if it was the wind, it was two winds blowing in opposite directions.  For while one half of the huge fire sloped one way towards the inland heights, the other half, at exactly the same angle, sloped out eastward towards the sea.  So that earth and ocean could behold, where there had been a mere fiery mass, a thing divided like a V—­a cloven tongue of flame.  But if it were a prodigy for those distant, it was something beyond speech for those quite near.  As the echoes of Evan’s last appeal rang and died in the universal uproar, the fiery vault over his head opened down the middle, and, reeling back in two great golden billows, hung on each side as huge and harmless as two sloping hills lie on each side of a valley.  Down the centre of this trough, or chasm, a little path ran, cleared of all but ashes, and down this little path was walking a little old man singing as if he were alone in a wood in spring.