Here the party, headed by Ogier, waited in patience till the signal flashed thrice from the heights opposite, when it was immediately answered by three corresponding flares of dry grass.
Then Ogier and his men, under cover of the darkness, moved up the river to the ford, waded across the water, and cautiously crept along the river bank among the osiers in straggling line, till they had reached a suitable point below the "Church." From this point they could see the lights from the windows of that unhallowed edifice shining before them, half-way up the sky like stars, but stars of lurid hue.
Then they sat down in the dewy grass and waited. Hour passed after hour. The stars before them waxed faint and went out.
Then, suddenly, bringing all to their feet, came the peal of the horn, echoed and re-echoed from every cliff, and followed by a crash and a flare.
The scene that ensued was one such as none who witnessed it had ever had a chance of beholding before, or were likely to see again.
The immense pile of brushwood and fat and other fuel caught with rapidity and rose in a burst of flame high up, as it were in mid-heaven, followed immediately by its being poured over the lip of the precipice, the molten, blazing tar, the incandescent fat, streaked the cliff as with rivers of light, fell on the projecting roof, ran in through the interstices created by the fall of stones that had shivered the covering tiles, and set fire to the rafters they had protected.
Dense volumes of swirling red smoke, in which danced ghostly jets of blue flame, rolled about the habitation of the robber band, and penetrated to its interior. It broke out of the windows in long spirals and tongues, forked as those of adders.
The rocks up the Vézère were visible, glaring orange, every tree was lit up, and its trunk turned to gold. The Vézère glowed a river of flame; clouds that had vanished gathered, crowding to see the spectacle, and palpitated above it.
"Forward!" yelled Ogier, and the whole party rushed up the steep ascent.
For one reason it would have been better had they crept up the steep slope before the horn was blown, so as to be ready at once to burst the gates and occupy every avenue. But Ogier had considered this course, and had deemed the risk greater than the advantage. To climb the rubble slope without displacing the shale was impossible; to do so without making sufficient noise to alarm the sentinel was hardly feasible in such a still night. This might have been done in blustering wind and lashing rain, not on such a night as that when the bullfrog's call rang down the valley and was answered by another frog a mile distant.