The land of rubbish and ashes, and little gray bricks,—little bricks all alike, scattered in countless myriads upon the sites of houses that have been destroyed, or upon the pavement of what once were streets.
Little gray bricks,—this is the sole material of which Pekin was built; a city of small, low houses decorated with a lacework of gilded wood; a city of which only a mass of curious débris is left, after fire and shell have crumbled away its flimsy materials.
We have come into the city at one of the corners where there was the fiercest fighting,—the Tartar quarter, which contained the European legations.
Long straight streets may still be traced in this infinite labyrinth of ruins; ahead of us all is gray or black; to the sombre gray of the fallen brick is added the monotonous tone which follows a fire,—the gloom of ashes and the gloom of coal.
Sometimes in crossing the road they form obstacles,—these tiresome little bricks; these are the remains of barricades where fighting must have taken place.
After a few hundred metres we enter the street of the legations, upon which for so many months the anxious attention of the whole world was fixed.
Everything is in ruins, of course; yet European flags float on every piece of wall, and we suddenly find, as we come out of the smaller streets, the same animation as at Tien-Tsin,—a continual coming and going of officers and soldiers, and an astonishing array of uniforms.
A big flag marks the entrance to what was our legation, two monsters in white marble crouch at the threshold; this is the etiquette for all Chinese palaces. Two of our soldiers guard the door which I enter, my thoughts recurring to the heroes who defended it.
We finally dismount, amid piles of rubbish, in an inner square near a chapel, and at the entrance to a garden where the trees are losing their leaves as an effect of the icy winds. The walls about us are so pierced with balls that they look like sieves. The pile of rubbish at our right is the legation proper, destroyed by the explosion of a Chinese mine. At our left is the chancellor's house, where the brave defenders of the place took refuge during the siege, because it was in a less exposed situation. They have offered to take me in there; it was not destroyed, but everything is topsy-turvy, as though it were the day after a battle; and in the room where I am to sleep the plasterers are at work repairing the walls, which will not be finished until this evening.