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The assault was urged with the most desperate energy and fearlessness. The defense was conducted with equal ferocity. Thousands fell on both sides in every mangled form of death. At last the besiegers undermined the walls, and placing beneath hundreds of barrels of gunpowder, as with the burst of a volcano, uphove the massive bastions to the clouds.
Fast flew the boat before the wind as though it would never stop, and the day was waning, and the wind still rising; and now the Isle of Ransom uphove huge before them, and coal-black, and no beach and no haven was to be seen therein; and still they ran before the wind towards that black cliff-wall, against which the sea washed for ever, and no keel ever built by man might live for one moment 'twixt the surf and the cliff of that grim land.
Nevertheless, I felt sure that my remark to the Frenchman was sound. A great show of uphove rocks and fragments of ice might have satisfied the eye; but the real work of the mines was wanted below; and since the force of the mighty explosion must needs expend itself somewhere, it was absurd to wish to see its effects in a part where its volcanic agency would be of little or no use.
The morning was clear, and Face-of-god looking north-and-by-west deemed he saw smoke rising into the air over the tree-covered ridges that hid the further distance toward that airt, though further east uphove the black shoulders of the Great that Waste and the snowy peaks behind them.
The weltering flames rose and fell as in the crater of a volcano, and in six hours the city was in ashes. Thousands perished in the flames. The fire, communicating with a powder magazine, produced an explosion which uphove the buildings like an earthquake, and prostrated more than a third of a mile of the city walls.
The drink gave me back my voice; yet for a while I could scarce speak, for the tears that swelled my heart. "Are there any more of ye?" said the captain. I answered, "No." "But what land's this?" he inquired. "An island uphove by an earthquake," said I. "Great thunder!" he cried. "And what's that arrangement in shells and weeds atop of it?"
Gaspard was silent, the heavens black; the great thought stood alone in Albano that he was hastening on toward the bloody scaffold and the throne-scaffolding of humanity, the heart of a cold, dead heathen-world, the eternal Rome; and when he heard, on the Ponte Molle, that he was now going across the Tiber, then was it to him as if the past had risen from the dead, as if the stream of time ran backward and bore him with it; under the streams of heaven he heard the seven old mountain-streams, rushing and roaring, which once came down from Rome's hills, and, with seven arms, uphove the world from its foundations.
It lay, a black mass, and whether it was a vast huddle of weeds, or a great whale killed by the earthquake, or solid land uphove by the volcanic rupture, was not conjecturable. It hung, still and not very tall, for I could not see that it put out any stars, and was about a mile distant.
Vast showers of splinters of ice fell as if from the sky, and rained like arrows through the smoke, but if there were any great blocks uphove they did not touch the ship.
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