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426 DARKNESS AND DAWN
crowded regions of the city, raging and crackling among the
old, tortuous purlieus and crazy habitations of the Subura.
With its hot breath it
purged the slums and rookeries, foul
with a pauper population of Oriental immigrants, who were
massed round the ill-famed shrines of Isis and Serapis. When
it had acquired irresistible volume in these lower regions,
it again rushed up the hills as with the rage of a demon, to
sweep down ouce more in tumultuous billows over the helpless
levels. For six days and seven nights it maintained its
horrible and splendid triumph now bounding from street to
street with prodigious rapidity, now seeming to linger luxuriously
in some crowded district, flinging up to heaven great
sheets of flame, and turning the nightly sky into a vault of
suffocating crimson.
No words can paint the horror of a scene which transformed
into a Gehenna of destruction a city enriched with
the magnificence of nearly eight centuries of victory. There
were districts in which the heat was so intense that they
were unapproachable, and the rarefaction of the atmosphere,
joined to a strong breeze which seemed in league with the
destroying element, filled the air with a roar as of ten
thousand wild beasts. Here stores of resinous material made
the consuming flames white with intensity and there the
;
burning and smouldering debris, which for a time half
choked the conflagration, poured forth black volumes of
smoke, which hid its progress under a pall of midnight. Here
an insula, many stories high, collapsed with a crash which
was heard for miles ;
and there whole streets, falling simultaneously
on both sides, caused continuous bursts of sound
like the long roll of incessant thunder.
But the physical horrors of the scene, as it was witnessed
by a million or more spectators who thronged from every
town of Latium and Campania to behold it, were nothing
compared with the prodigies of human agony and the multiform
images of death and crime. At first there had been
wild efforts on the part of many to save their homes. But
their efforts were rendered futile by many causes. The conflagration
seemed to break forth, not in one spot, but from
various quarters, which rolled together their concurrent seas
of flame. No means were adequate to resist a foe which
seemed to be ubiquitous. The scorching heat drove back the