While the fight for the magazine had been going on, a tragedy of equal horror was taking place at the Cashmere Gate, and in the cantonments beyond the city walls. At both these places the sepoys had shot down or bayoneted their English officers, and when the magazine blew up, the natives of the 38th Regiment, throwing off the mask, suddenly fired a volley at their officers, three of whom fell dead. “Two of the survivors,” writes an historian of that awful time, “rushed up to the bastion of the main guard and jumped down thirty feet into the ditch below. The rest were following, when, hearing the shrieks of the women in the guard-room, they ran back under a storm of bullets to rescue them. The women were shuddering as they looked down the steep bank, and asking each other whether it would be possible to descend, when a round shot whizzing over their heads warned them not to hesitate. Fastening their belts and handkerchiefs together, the officers let themselves down, and then, having helped the women to follow, carried them with desperate struggles, up the opposite side,” whence the fugitives could reach the jungle. At the cantonments the fate of the English--women, children, and a few surviving officers--was something similar, and then began that piteous flight, with all its frightful sufferings, which hardened the hearts of the British to inflict a terrible revenge. Meanwhile, in the city of Delhi itself rebellion was triumphant and merciless. All the Europeans that could be found were massacred and tortured in the most barbarous manner. Some fifty of them at the first sound of alarm had barricaded themselves--men and women--in one of the strongest houses of the English quarter. But they were ill-armed and without supplies, and what could they do against the furious rabble or ruffians who besieged them? They were dragged to the palace and lodged in a dungeon without windows, and with only one door. After five days these were all taken out into a courtyard and butchered in cold blood, their mangled bodies being piled on carts and thrown into the Jumna. That was on the 16th May--five days after the arrival of the mutineers from Meerut; and now Delhi had been cleansed of its last Christian. Murder and rapine, arson and outrages which cannot even be named, had done their fell work, and the English _Raj_, or rule, had been trampled underfoot no less at Delhi than at Cawnpore, Lucknow, and other centres of revolt. The climax of the rebellion had now been reached, but there still had to come the inevitable anti-climax. The blood of hundreds of English men, and women, and children, wantonly slaughtered, was crying aloud for vengeance, and a terrible vengeance it would be.