Burnes and his companions fell. There was a great plunder of property. The treasury of Captain Johnson, the Shah’s paymaster, was sacked. Thirsting for gold, and thirsting for blood, the insurgents undermined the walls and burnt the gateway of the house; then falling, like wild beasts, on all whom they met, and slaughtering guards and servants—men, women, and children, alike, in their indiscriminate fury—they glutted themselves with the treasure,[105] and to complete their work of mischief, burnt all the records of the office. The noise in the city was now growing louder and louder. The multitude was swelling in numbers, and waxing more terrible in excitement and wrath. But still no measures were taken to quell the riot or chastise the rioters; no troops were poured into the city; no British officer led his battalions to the charge, or opened upon the enemy with a shower of unanswerable grape. The escort, at Burnes’s house, held for some time in painful inactivity by his misplaced forbearance, had fought with a desperate energy, which, in the end, cost them their lives; and the guard at the pay-office, with scarcely less constancy and courage, had protected their charge until overwhelmed by the rush of their assailants, and slaughtered almost to a man. What could these little bands of loyal men do against the surging multitude that flooded the streets? Emboldened by impunity, the licentious crowd pushed on to new deeds of murder and rapine; and soon the whole city was in a roar of wild tumultuous excitement. Shops were gutted; houses were burned; men, women, and children, in the residences of our officers, mixed up in indiscriminate slaughter;—and all this with six thousand British troops within half an hour’s march of the rebellious city.