Aided by the wild confusion, the sudden darkness of the tropical night, and not a little by his disguised visage and native costume, Robert Wodrow achieved a passage into the streets of the city, and from thence, as all thoroughfares save those in the vicinity of the Bala Hissar were deserted, into the open plain near the city, and there he threaded his way without molestation among the apple, citron, and olive groves, the mud forts and garden walls, till he found a plantation of sugar-canes, and then, weary, worn, covered with bruises, famished, and athirst--ready almost to weep--after the past excitement of that terrible day, and the loss of all his friends and comrades--last, not least, Leslie Colville, he flung himself on the ground to recover breath and to think over the situation. Day was dawning, and tipping with red and gold the summits of the Bala Hissar, when Wodrow awoke to find that he had been asleep for some hours, and now rose, stiff and sore in every limb. The flames of the conflagration had died out, but a black pall of smoke overhung the towers and battlements of the ancient and picturesque palatial fortress, which, with a recklessness of courage for which it is difficult to account, he actually resolved to revisit, as if to see the last--the end of everything. He had the caution, however, to readjust his disguise, to carefully load his revolver, and by untwisting another cartridge and mixing the powder in a dew-laden leaf, to carefully retouch his face, using the case of his watch as a mirror, and to re-blacken his hands and wrists, before he ventured near the scene of the last night's horrors. Of the Residency, the blackened walls and smouldering ashes alone remained, and as these furnished no 'loot,' the place was deserted by all save the dead. Of the latter there lay heaped over each other, and soaked in each other's blood, some five hundred Afghans, attesting--irrespective of wounded--of the stubborn vigour of the defence, for every cartridge fired by the desperate few must have told more than double among the masses. The marble arches and pillars of the beautiful carved arcades and open galleries, the walls and pavement, were all spotted and starred by the bullets of rifles and carbines, and clots and splashes of blood were everywhere, with the corpses of the Europeans and Guides, easily distinguished by their uniforms. The solitary survivor saw the body of the young and gallant Hamilton, stripped of his braided jacket and woefully gashed, lying across a mountain gun, over which he had fallen or been flung by his slayers, 'and beyond it, in a trench which the Afghans had failed to storm, were heaped, thick and charred by fire, the corpses of the heroic Guides. Each man had died where he stood, and in their rear were the smouldering ruins of the building wherein Cavagnari, Kelly, and others were lying.'