whirlwind of fire and smoke rise from the middle of the place. It was like the bursting of a volcano--one of the things that I can never forget after twenty-six years. Enormous blocks of stone were hurled into the trenches, where they killed and wounded some of our men. Guns of heavy calibre were lifted from the ramparts and hurled down far outside them. When the smoke cleared off, a great part of Almeida had disappeared, and the rest was a heap of débris[318].’ Five hundred of the garrison perished, including nearly every man of the two hundred artillerymen who were serving the guns on the front of attack. Some inhabitants were killed, but not many, for the majority had taken refuge in the casemates when the bombardment began that morning. It was the unfortunate soldiers who were manning the walls that suffered. [317] This version of the cause of the disaster is given by Soriano da Luz (iii. 73) from the mouth of an artillery officer (one José Moreira) who had it from the only man in the castle-yard who escaped. This soldier, seeing the train fired, jumped into an oven-hole which lay behind him, and chanced not to be killed. [318] Sprünglin’s _Journal_, pp. 444-5. [Illustration: COMBAT OF THE COA. JULY 24TH, 1810.] Fearing that the French might seize the moment for an escalade, General Cox ran to the ramparts and, assisted by a Portuguese artillery officer, loaded and fired into the trenches some of the few guns on the south front which were not disabled. He turned out the whole garrison, and kept them under arms that night, lying behind the walls in expectation of an assault which never came. The morning light enabled him to realize the full extent of the disaster; the bastions and curtains had suffered little, the shell, so to speak, of the town was still intact, and the casemates had stood firm, but everything within the enceinte was wrecked. Only five houses in the place had kept their roofs: the castle was a deep hole, like the crater of a volcano: the streets were absolutely blocked with ruins, so that there was no going from place to place save along the ramparts.