No one will ever tell precisely what happened during the firing of the city. Europeans gathered on their housetops in the Concessions to watch and to feel their hearts torn with pity. One gazed abstractedly into a boiling cauldron, and expected that behind the lurid flame thousands were pitifully exchanging their sad farewells ere they settled down to die. There seemed to be no escape for the poor people other than in the grave; all effort seemed to be void of hope. As one watched he seemed to feel that underneath those roofs the saddest scenes possible to enact in history were being recorded with sad, sad tears. He seemed to feel that they were huddled round, those men and women, those little children, those invalids, those blind, those poor people who were about to die like rats in their holes. And there crept into one's soul an infinite pathos. [Illustration: THE SING SENG ROAD. The smartest thoroughfare of Hankow, after the fire. For over a week fierce fighting was maintained here.] But I ask again, Can _you_ imagine all this? And imagining, think you that you could describe? I watch, and watch. The flames seem to draw me into their fiery bosom as the phosphorus does in the sea. I can see it all, spreading away madly to the right, to the left, then again meeting in the centre. It tears cruelly along does this great belt of jagged flame, and soon will {83} meet its fellow. They seem to be racing, each section of that horrid fire appearing to be vieing with that other section in killing and burning, in slow death, many peaceable people who were unable to flee. On it goes again, and upwards, downwards, in, out, back, forth; sometimes it comes to a greater mass, which yields less readily, and there it sits, like some great bird of prey, until its conquest is at hand, and then goes forward again with a furious glee. I have asked you whether, imagining this, you could describe it. Here am I, seated on a lofty rooftop, and see it. It is here, in all its horrible reality, happening before my eyes as I write, making the history of our time, and it is my business to describe it; that is why I am here. And yet my pen falls helplessly. It baffles description. The phraseology will not come. The words stick, the pen remains unmoved; I cannot describe it. By far the worst thing I have ever known is this savage razing of a great city to become a city of the dead and a place of weeping. [Illustration: Map of Hankow Native City Showing Burnt Area.]