At this juncture Jack felt the necessity of obtaining a view of the whole position. He looked round for some point of observation. Through a large rent in one of the walls to his right he perceived the remains of a staircase to the second story. Was there time to clamber up it before the French burst in? "I’ll chance it," he said to himself. Ordering his men to stand firm, he ran across the narrow lane, through the wall, and began to ascend the staircase. It was a rickety structure; its top had been blown away; it remained upright only by favour of one or two stout joists which had been so firmly embedded in the stone as to withstand the shock of the explosion when the party-wall was cracked. Up he went. The stairs creaked under him; at every step it seemed that the whole structure would fall with him. But at length he reached a spot whence, through a hole in what had been once the wall, he could see for a considerable distance over the quarter occupied by the French. To his left he saw the dreary waste of ruins through which, by patient mining and sudden rushes, the French had made their painful way from the convent of Santa Engracia, which stood a woful spectacle of destruction some hundreds of yards distant. Eastward he traced their progress through a series of dismantled buildings, up to within a short distance of the Franciscan convent. Farther to the right they had made yet deeper inroads into the city, and were now almost within arm’s-length of the Coso. Jack thought, with a sudden pang, of the danger Juanita would soon be in, and decided that at the earliest opportunity he must persuade her to change her quarters and retire northwards, loth as he was to see her in that fever-haunted spot. Suddenly his eye was caught by a compact body of French, about 500 in number, advancing at the quick step across the wide open space outside the Santa Engracia convent. They had evidently been hurried from the entrenchments beyond the walls. At the same time, glancing to the right, he saw another body of men issuing from some buildings near the Coso. Clearly no time was to be lost. Outnumbered already, he had only held his own up to the present by having the advantage of the defensive position. But the position was not strong. If the French occupied the adjoining ruins in force there was scarcely an inch of cover for his men. He must, therefore, at once blow up the head of the French gallery leading below the Casa Tobar, which he had been unable to do hitherto for fear of destroying his own men, and then withdraw his troops to their original position. In face of the large French reinforcements coming up, it would be as much as he could do to hold his own even there. Springing down the staircase, three steps at a time, one of them breaking through and falling with a crash behind him, he hastened back to his men. He called up a little musketeer belonging to the Murcian tiradores—one of the few survivors of that regiment—