Well, we fired our fagots, and they gleamed up fiercely to welcome the scullion levies to their doom. Never did you see such a ruddy, wild scene—such a motley parody of noble war! The bright flames leaped into the tranquil sky in volcanoes of spark and hissing tongues, the British rushed at us between the fires like imps of darkness, and we met them face to face and slew them like the dogs they were. In a few minutes we were hemmed in the veranda, under whose columns we had some shelter, and then my brave Welshmen showed me how they could pull their long bows, which indeed they did in right good earnest, until all the trim terraces were littered with writhing, howling foemen.
But again they drove us back, this time into the house, and there we soon had a better light to fight by, for the sparks had caught the roof, and soon everything far and near was ablaze. Every man with me that night fought like a patrician, and Electra’s walls, with their endless painted garlands of oak and myrtle, their cooing doves and tender Cupids, were horribly besmeared and smudged; and her marble pillars were chipped by flying javelins and gashed by random axe-strokes.
Ten times we hurled ourselves upon the invaders and drove them staggering backward over the slippery pavements into the passages—sixteen men had fallen to my own arm alone, and we crammed their bodies into the doorways for barricade. But it would not do. The sheer weight of those without made the men within brave against their will. Nothing availed the stinging shafts of my Welshmen, the Iberian scimitars played hopelessly (like summer lightning in the glare) upon a solid wall of humanity, and the German axes could make no pathway through that impenetrable civilian tangle.
Overhead and among us the smoke curled and eddied, and the flames behind it made it like a hot noonday in our fighting-place. And in the wreaths of that pungent vapor, circling thick and yellow in the great open-roofed hall of the noble Roman villa, her ladyship’s statues of faun and satyr still fluted and grinned imbecilely as though they liked the turmoil. Niobe wept for new griefs as the marble little ones at her feet were calcined before her eyes, and the Gorgon head wore a hundred frightful snakes of flame; the pale, proud Pallas Athene of the Greeks looked disdainfully on the dying barbarians at her feet, and Pan, himself in bronze, leered on us through the reek until his lower limbs grew white hot—and gave way, and down he came—whereon a mighty Briton heaved him up by his head, and with this hissing, glowing flail carried destruction and confusion among us.
It was so hot in that flaming marble battle-place that foreigner and Briton broke off fighting now and then to kneel together for a moment at the red fountain basins where the jets still played (for the fugitives had forgotten to turn them off), and quenched their thirst in hurried gasps, ere flying again at each other’s throats, and so wild the confusion and uproar, and so dense the smoke and flame, so red and slippery were the pavements, and so thick the dead and dying, that hardly one could tell which were friends and which foes.
For an hour we kept them at bay, and then, when my arms ached with killing, all of a sudden the face of a man unknown to me, whom I never had seen before, shone in the gleam at my shoulder.
“Phra the Phœnician,” he said, calling me by an appellation no living man then knew, “I am bidden to get you hence. Come to the inner doorway—quick!”
I hardly knew what he meant, but there was that about him which I could not but obey, so I turned and followed his retreating figure.
I ran with him across the courtyard, under the white marble pillars all aglow, through the silent banquet-hall that had echoed so often to the haughty laughter of my mistress, and then when we reached the cool, damp outer air—like a wreath of mist in November, like an eddy among the dead leaves—my guide vanished and left me!
Angry and surprised, but with no time for wonder, I turned back.