We laboured like slaves, carrying merchandise, fixtures, furniture, anything and everything from the darkened interiors of buildings to the open spaces. I worked as I had never worked before, and not once did I know whose property I thus saved. At first I groped in the darkness, seizing what I could; then gradually, like the glow of a red dawn, a strange light grew, showing dimly and ruddily the half-guessed features of the place. It glowed, this light, increasing in power as heating metal slowly turns red. And then the flames licked through; and dripping with sweat, I abandoned that place to its enemy. All sense of time and all sense of locality were lost. The world was a strange world of deep, concealing shadows and strong, revealing glares, and a mist of smoke, and hurrying, shouting, excited multitudes. Sometimes I found myself in queer little temporary eddies of stillness, where a certain calm and leisure seemed to have been insulated. Then for a brief moment or so I rested. Occasionally I would find myself with some stranger, and we would exchange brief exclamatory remarks. "Whole city is going!" "Looks like it." "Hear a roof fell in and killed twenty men." "Probably exaggerated." "Probably. Don't catch me under no falling roofs! When she gets afire, I get out." "Same here." "Well, I suppose we ought to try to do _something_." "Suppose so." And we would go at it again. At the end of two or three hours--no man can guess time in such a situation--the fire stopped advancing. I suppose the wind must have changed, though at the time I did not notice it. At any rate, I found myself in the gray dawn looking rather stupidly at a row of the frailest kind of canvas and scantling houses which the fire had sheared cleanly in two, and wondering why in thunder the rest of them hadn't burned! A dense pall of smoke hung over the city, and streamed away to the south and east. In the burned district all sense of location had been lost. Where before had been well-known landmarks now lay a flat desert. The fire had burned fiercely and completely, and, in lack of food, had died down to almost nothing. A few wisps of smoke still rose, a few coals glowed, but beside them nothing remained to indicate even the laying out of the former plan. Only over across a dead acreage of ashes rose here and there the remains of isolated brick walls. They looked, through the eddying mists and smoke, like ancient ruins, separated by wide spaces. I gazed dully across the waste area, taking deep breaths, resting, my mind numb. Then gradually it was borne in on me that the Plaza itself looked rather more empty-sided than it should. A cold hand gripped my heart. I began to skirt the smouldering embers of the shanties and wooden warehouses, trying to follow where the streets had been. Men were prowling about everywhere, blackened by smoke, their clothing torn and burned.