Lindbohm urged this cheering assurance with the insistent frequency of a man who is trying to water his own hopes. On the edge of the ruined quarter was a pile of rubbish which had once been a cottage. Three of the walls had fallen down, but the one facing the street was still standing. A young and beautiful Cretan woman looked in through one of the holes where the windows had been, watching a man who was clearing away debris with a shovel and lifting blocks of stone to one side. The woman's face was drawn with agony, and she stared at the man, great eyed and silent, like a tortured dumb creature. Every time that he lifted a rock, she gave some sign of a fiercer wrench of pain, as when the executioner gives another twist to the rack; sometimes she thrust one hand against the window sill and swung part way around, as though about to fall; sometimes she clasped her hands to her heart and gasped for breath. Once she covered her eyes for a long time as though fearful of seeing the very thing she was waiting for. And when at last the man lifted a little charred body from the crumbled lime, she broke into a series of dreadful screams, shrieking "No! No! No!" until her voice died into a hoarse whisper. The husband tore off his jacket, wrapped it around the tiny body and came into the street, his own grief eclipsed by the greater solicitude for the young wife. And when the woman took the pitiful burden, rocking it on her heart and talking baby talk to it, he walked by her side, patted her disheveled hair, and tried to call her back from the brink of insanity with endearing terms. As they passed through the throng of waiting Cretans, every man removed his head-covering, hat, fez or handkerchief, and made the sign of the cross. "Come away," said Lindbohm, choking, "the poor little baby." "I want to get out of this damned place," shouted Curtis with sudden vehemence, shaking his fist. "It's a hell of horrors and I'm sick of it!" "Courage, courage," said Lindbohm, "the more horrible it is the more haste we must make to find Panayota. Poor Panayota! She is no horror, eh, my friend?" They came into the public square, where the shells from the "Hazard" had fallen thickest, for here the Bashi Bazouks had fired on the British soldiers, and yonder, rising precipitously to a height of thirty feet, was the fortified stronghold from which the Turkish guard had poured a rain of bullets upon the town. English sentries were now pacing to and fro up there. But the chief attraction was a sort of booth in the center of the square, for all the world like a Punch and Judy booth, and in it were hanging by the neck seven figures with black caps over their heads, with their hands bound behind them and their feet tied together. "By George, they've been hanging the ringleaders, hanging them higher than Haman!" cried Lindbohm.