Deeper and deeper in toward the gray low beach the little boat was pulled, its occupants the first to look upon the heaped and over-running measure of Saint Pierre's destruction. The three took turns at the oars. Fear and suffering brought out a strange feminine quality in the sailor, not of cowardice; rather he seemed beset by visionary terrors. Rare running-mates were Macready and Ernst, odd as two white men can be, but matched to a hair in courage. The German bent to his work, a grim stolid mechanism. Macready jerked at the oars, and found breath and energy remaining to assail the world, the flesh and the devil, which was Pugh, with his barbed and invariably glib tongue. How many times the blue eyes of the German rolled back under the lids, and his grip relaxed upon the oars; how many times the whipping tongue of Macready mumbled, forgetting its object, while his senses reeled against the burning walls of his brain; how many times the sailor hoarsely commanded them to look through the fog for figures which alone he saw--only God and these knew. But the little boat held its prow to the desolate shore. They gained the Sugar Landing at last, or the place where it had been, and strange sounds came from the lips of Ernst, as he pointed to the hulk of the _Saragossa's_ launch, burned to the water-line. It had been in his care steadily until its last trip. Gray-covered heaps were sprawled upon the shore, some half-covered by the incoming tide, others entirely awash. Pelée had brought down the city; and the fire-tiger had rushed in at the kill. He was hissing and crunching still, under the ruins. The sailor moaned and covered his face. "There's nothing alive!" he repeated with dreadful stress. "What else would you look for--here at the very fut av the mountain?" Macready demanded. "Wait till we get over the hill, and you'll hear the birds singin' an' the naygurs laughin' in the fields an' wonderin' why the milkman don't come." The market-place near the shore was filled with the stones from the surrounding buildings, hurled there as dice from a box. Smoke and steam oozed from every ruin. The silence was awful as the sight of death. The streets of the city were effaced. Saint Pierre had been felled and altered, as the Sioux women once altered the corpses of the slain whites. There was no discernible way up the _Morne_. Breathing piles of debris barred every passage. Under one of these, a clock suddenly struck three--an irreverent survival carrying on its shocking business beneath the collapsed walls of a burned and beaten city, frightening them hideously. It would have been impossible to traverse _Rue Victor Hugo_ had the way been clear, since a hundred feet from the shore or less, they encountered a zone of unendurable heat. "I could die happy holdin' Pugh here," Macready gasped. "Do you think hell is worse than this, Ernst, barrin' the effrontery of the question? Ha--don't step there!"