but wait.

Quarters of an hour, half-hours, pass. This waiting for terrible news
calms them; they hope afresh. The officers ride to and fro; the villas
and factories yonder are deserted: a whole town lies empty, forsaken.
Prince Dutri, turning his horse, which he has ridden out of breath,
assures them that the embankment will hold firm; after he has spoken
with the princes, he is surrounded: it is the occupiers of the villas,
the manufacturers, who overwhelm him with questions, fortified by the
self-assurance of the imperial equerry. Dutri gallops off once more.

Now the doors of the church are opened wide, quite wide; at the end of
the vista, between the pillars, the tiny lights glitter on the altar; a
procession files out slowly: a mitred bishop, priests, acolytes, singing
and carrying banners and swinging clouds of smoke from their censers;
behind the upraised crucifix, the relics of St. Therezia, in their
antique shrine of medieval gold and crystal and precious stones, round
or roughly cut; it is borne under a canopy and in the shimmering gleam
of candles it glitters and sparkles like a sacred jewel, like a
constellation, across that sombre square, through that black night of
disaster; flicker the giant emeralds, glitters the precious chased gold
and before the Most Holy the crowded populace draws back on either side
and falls upon its knees. This is the fifth time to-day that the
procession goes its round, that the reliquary is borne on high, to
exorcize the calamity. It passes the statue, the princes kneel down; the
Latin of the chant, the gleam of the relics in their shrine, the cloud
of the incense pass over them with the blessing of the bishop....

The procession has brought stillness to the square, but a murmur now
approaches as from afar.... The crowd seems to surge as though in one
wave, nobody is now kneeling; the very procession is broken up and
confused. Through the throng rushes the report: the dyke has given
way!...

They do not yet believe it; but suddenly from above the fort of St.
Ladislas, which spreads its ramparts about the castle, a shot thunders
out and vibrates over the black city and shakes through the black sky as
though its rebound were breaking against the lowering clouds. A second
shot thunders after it, as with giant cymbals of catastrophe, a third
... the whole town knows that the Zanthos has broken the dyke.

The whole square is in confused motion, like a swarm of ants; troops of
t