ed her by the arm and pointed to some men with
torches moving among the ruins. She supposed that they were seeking
for the dead; but they were, in fact, incendiaries, already at work
and in search of loot.

She passed three or four of these blazing houses, some kindled no
doubt by incendiaries, but others by natural consequences of the
earthquake; for the kitchens, heated for the great feast, had
communicated their fires to the falling timberwork on which the
houses were framed; and by this time the city was on fire in at least
thirty different places. The scorched smell mingled everywhere with
an odour of sulphur.

There were rents in the streets, too--chasms, half-filled with
rubble, reaching right across the roadway. After being snatched back
by Langton from the brink of one of these chasms, Ruth steeled her
heart to be thankful when a burning house shed light for her
footsteps. At the houses themselves, after an upward glance or two,
she dared not look again. They leaned this way and that, the fronts
of some thrust outward at an angle to forbid any but the foolhardiest
from passing underneath.

But, indeed, they had little time to look aloft as they penetrated to
streets littered, where the procession had passed, with wrecked
chaises, dead mules, human bodies half-buried and half-burnt, charred
limbs protruding awkwardly from heaps of stones. Here, by ones and
twos, pedestrians tottered past, crying that the world was at an end;
here, on a heap where, belike, his shop had stood, a man knelt
praying aloud; here a couple of enemies met by chance, seeking their
dead, and embraced, beseeching forgiveness for injuries past.
These sights went by Ruth as in a dream; and as in a dream she heard
the topple and crack of masonry to right and left. Langton guided
her; and haggard, perspiring, they bent their heads to the strange
wind now howling down the street as through a funnel, and foot by
foot battled their way.

The wind swept over their bent heads, carrying flakes of fire to
start new conflagrations. The stream of these flakes became so
steady that Ruth began to count on it to guide her. She began to
think that amid all this dissolution to right and left, some charm
must be protecting them both, when, as he stretched a hand to help
her across a mound of rubble she saw him turn, cast a look up and
fall back beneath a rush of masonry. A flying brick struck her on
the shoulder, cutting the flesh. For the re