Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/393

Rh some shaky, nearby hovels that a breath could have swept away, and even spared a part of the cartridge plant, while it had overturned and pulverized buildings several kilometers off, reduced to jelly torpedo-proof masonry, broken like a wisp of straw the piles and the joists of docks, converted iron into filings, and rumpled like a piece of silk the galvanized sheet-iron roofs of the warehouses.

Ruins leaned in an unstable state of equilibrium and slashed themselves into fabulous profiles and unheard of styles of architecture.

Before the third stroke of three rang out, from behind the cartridge plant, hissing and howling like a host of snakes, there surged a flaming geyser whose waves rolled a surface of ten hectares; all the stock of petroleum, fifty thousand barrels, burst into flame, like a simple match.

And such was the progress of the conflagration, such was the fury of this incendiary tide that it seemed about to submerge the metropolis and swallow its river at one gulp.

Through an illusion of perspective, the enormous red tongues, immoderately elongated, all darting in the same direction, were licking the buttresses of the cathedral. In spite of the broad daylight, the towering pile reflected a sunset. And the ships in the basins, alternately masked and uncovered as the flaming waves scattered away from them or drew near to them, seemed the playtoys of these devouring billows, to pitch upon an ocean in eruption.

The apocalyptic splendor of the spectacle ended by drowning Laurent's horror and pity in a monstrous trance. But the bitumen and sulpher were not raining from the skies. Never had so pure and so sweet